He was glad he had given him a spoonful of Distant instead of grinding the best coffee. ‘You are a vile little rat, aren’t you?’
He threw the Times down pettishly. ‘Now you’re sounding like your old self. It didn’t take long, did it?’
‘I’ll tek just as long as I like,’ Bert snarled.
‘Well, you know,’ he became more relaxed, a state which Herbert was dead set to alter, ‘it isn’t fair to deceive people.’
‘What do you intend to do about it, you jumped-up publisher’s pimp? I didn’t think they paid you enough to suck their arses.’ Stirring his coffee, Herbert went through the fantasy of murdering him and burying the corpse in the garden. A pleasant few minutes would be had, booting down the soil.
‘What you have done’, Dominic went on, ‘is absolutely immoral, but at least I’d be interested to know how you did it. It wasn’t a bad performance. The last time I saw you before you turned up at our office was when you absconded from school.’ His face fizzled back into that of a frightened little boy. ‘You never wrote to let me know how you’d got on. They were the most miserable months of my life.’
‘I’m sorry about that. But I was too busy fitting into my new circumstances. I’ll tell you how it was done, though.’ He explained the metamorphosis, and at the end of his narrative didn’t need to suggest he was more than halfway into another. ‘Don’t you think it was something of an achievement, living two different lives for so long?’
‘I ought to, I suppose, but wouldn’t it be even more of an achievement if you came clean, and told Humphries who you are?’
‘He wouldn’t believe me, and even if he did he wouldn’t want to. I’m making him too much money, and making too much myself. To tell him so that he would be absolutely convinced might give him a heart attack. Not that I’d be bothered about that, but he does have faith in me as Bert Gedling, and that’s flattering to my vanity.’
‘You always had plenty of that.’
‘So I did. I’m a writer, after all. Which also means I’m amoral.’ As time passed, however, he’d relax his guard, and blend with the surrounding milieu, be tamed and controlled by the sort of people he would need to mix with. By becoming one of them, they would stop commenting on how he dressed, especially when he allowed them to see what a good job he was making of his integration into the accepted way of life. As his accent became indistinguishable from theirs, his Thurgarton-Strang stridence would be taken as just another of Bert Gedling’s affectations.
On the other hand if Dominic decided to rip his disguise clear with something like proof he would be tempted to dissimulate to the end. Few would believe such an outlandish story, or care to. He would drive the chariot of Bert across the heavens till it broke up, or Herbert brought the whole caboodle into a controlled landing. No matter what change came about in his novels and filmscripts (or even essays: he was collecting notes for ‘The Art and Metaphysics of Straight Narrative’) he would never let them forget that plain Bert Gedling could come lumbering back into the ring any time he liked — whether to their amusement or dismay was no concern of his. ‘Why do you need to tell Humphries? I don’t see what’s in it for you.’
‘Because I can’t live within spitting distance of a lie, or allow you to do so. It’s rather curious, but I still look on you as a friend.’
‘You poor little worm who never grew up. You’d be an informer, would you? A nark. A sneak. You’d shop your own grandmother for that little frisson of school-prefect honour. Don’t you know that that kind of thing is on the way out?’
Dominic winced. ‘It’s not. You’re premature. I’ll never believe it. The fact is, I’m leaving the firm.’
‘Are you?’
‘I’m going into the Foreign Office. I’ve always wanted to. Well, my parents never stopped hoping while I was at Cambridge. It’ll be a far better job, so I must clear matters up before I go.’
‘So that’s your nasty little game? Want to go out with a bang, do you? Do you remember your last words to me when I lit off from school that night?’ He looked at him with the most candid and intimate expression possible. ‘I remember, if you don’t.’
‘What were they?’
‘You said, “I’ll never betray you.”’
‘Maybe I did. And if I did, that’s why I want you to own up. Don’t you see?’
‘You’ll do well at the Foreign Office. I will own up, though, in my own good time.’
‘No, Herbert, it has to be in my time.’ Dominic’s expression was that of a satisfied cat with a half-dead mouse at its feet. ‘I can’t let you play false to yourself any longer.’
Herbert laughed at his language, and his sentiments from a dying age. He endured the silence, determined not to speak. If he’d had a cricket bat handy Bert would have broken it over the smarmy fuckpig’s loaf.
‘There’s only one thing which will stop me blowing the gaff.’ Dominic put on his sickliest face. ‘Shall I tell you what it is?’
Herbert’s ears were stopped as if by the noise of the factory, but through the roar of engines he choked out: ‘Go on, then, Slime.’
‘What I want to say is that I’ll tell Humphries the truth, unless you stop seeing Deborah. I’m in love with her. Always have been. I want to marry her, if she’ll have me.’
Herbert had never known there were words which could shock and oppress him to the extent that they would bring him close to fainting. He leaned against the desk. ‘Have you asked her?’
‘No, but I will.’
The poor honourable fool, not having the guile or gumption to lie and say she’d accepted him. He’d often wondered whether or not Dominic was his rival, and Deborah hadn’t bothered to settle the matter, though he was hardly in a position to cavil about somebody keeping their past to themselves. ‘Well, I have asked her, and she’s said yes.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Dominic said with trembling lips.
Bert stood, thumbs wide-angled in the arm holes of his waistcoat, where they were safer than being free to punch Dominic’s face in. ‘Believe what you like, but it’s true. You can do what you like, as well, but let me tell you this, you blackmailing runt: if you aren’t out o’ this flat in three seconds — no, two — I’ll give yer the sort o’ kicking’ yer’ll never forget. And if yer do blow the gaff I’ll cum after yer wherever you are, even if ye’re dyin’ from malaria in the middle o’ Borneo.’ He freed his hands from the waistcoat, and smiled. ‘Understand, old boy?’
He wouldn’t bother, but let him worry. The door slammed, and he picked up the phone so that he could pop the question to Deborah. In love with her more than ever, the wonderful word yes came into his ear.
Twenty-Three
The telegram said: ‘Father died of massive stroke in middle of night. Devastated. Mother.’ Herbert thought him luckier than Mrs Denman, to go in such a way. The bullet zigzagging around the Arakan jungle nearly twenty years before had hopped on a plane and found its mark at last. So many people were dying it seemed as if God had got his hands on a machine gun.
He settled into the car, regretting he hadn’t been there to see him go. Headlamps burning, he threaded the needle between trucks and the offside green verge, overtaking with a screeching hooter where no sane person would, but slowing down at the latter part of the journey because he didn’t want either the shame or inconvenience of following his father so soon.