Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (46 page)

While South is away, West pours herself another large one, and, grown consequently maudlin, stares at South's cards until the tears begin rolling down her cheeks. East says What is it now? and West sobs I never get cards like that, I never ever get good cards, to which West responds It wouldn't matter much if you did, and West howls What is that supposed to mean? and runs out, just as South returns, in a blouse and slacks, saying It may interest you to know that I have had to chuck that dress in the bin, it is ruined, whose deal is it, where the hell is West? In response, there is a thud and assorted tinkles from beyond the room, and, after some time, West shuffles unsteadily in. She is covered in earth and petals, and opens with You ought to do something about that rug, to which North responds What rug? encouraging the reply You know what bloody rug, the one that slides and could kill people, evoking South's intervention of How can it slide, it has that big Edwardian pedestal jardinière standing on it, the one my mother left me. West says Pass. South asks East what she means by Pass, is this some convention I haven't come across, and East responds you have now, it means there isn't a jardinière standing on it any more, look at the state of her.

It is at this point that the distraught West gropes frantically inside her handbag, leading North, South and East to conclude that she is looking for a mirror and make-up, but West is actually engaged in a sly finesse, since what she is really after is her Valium. Before anyone can intervene, she has popped four pills, washed them down with the remaining contents of the jug, and slumped face down on the table. East deals.

85
The Long Goodbye

I
f I shove up the sash of my loft window tonight, for the last time, and I risk my neck with fraying sashcord, for the last time, by poking my head out, for the last time, an ear to the nocturnal hum of Cricklewood, shall I hear, above that hum, the cheery song of a cockney ghost? Why not? She is, after all, just a couple of hundred yards away, and tonight is her cue, if any night ever was, for song. True, she has been silent in her grave, in the cemetary at the corner of my road, since 1922, but what of that? I shall hear Marie Lloyd singing, even if nobody else does.

Because she will be telling me not to dilly-dally on the way. And she is right: I shall not dilly-dally long. Just long enough to tell you, who have dallied here with me over the long years, that, an hour or so ago, off went the van with my home packed in it. I, however, did not walk behind with my old cock linnet, I stayed behind with my old cock typewriter, because I wanted this empty house to echo, for the last time, to the skeletal rattle of the old Remington boneshaker which took down my first Cricklewood communique, 28 years ago. I shall not pass it to you from there, mind, because a lot has happened in 28 years and newspapers do not take typescript any more; I shall, in a bit, pocket it, and go off to my nice new house, and transcribe it onto a computer which will phone it to
The Times
. I am not, if you are reaching for the Kleenex, doing this out of mawkishness; I am doing it because if I just went off and did it on my computer, I could not write about being in Cricklewood, since my computer is on the van, and when it gets out of the van, in an hour or so, it will not be in Cricklewood.

All right, pluck the Kleenex: I cannot fib to you, you know me too well, I am doing this partly out of mawkishness. Anyone leaving the house in which he has spent half his life will be a mawk. Do you, by the way, know what a mawk is? It is a maggot. At least, it was when Old Norsemen were naming things, but if you were pondering why this word should gradually have turned into what it means now, stop. Especially with Marie up the road, and with me feeling, tonight, a trifle mortal, too, and furthermore, sensing around me the ghosts – though sceptics among you are welcome to call them memories – of all those who have passed temporarily through this house during those 28 years, and have now passed permanently elsewhere.

If I look down into the garden from this open window, I can see them all on the lawn, drinking, talking, eating, laughing, sniffing the roses, plucking the raspberries, peering in the pond for fish, poking in the shrubbery for cricket balls, all that. It is, of course, pitch dark down there, so you wouldn't be able to see them, but I can. I can even see me, though it requires something of an effort to recognise him, because it is his first day in the garden: he is slim, he has hair, he has one child on his shoulders and one in his arms; a feat he would find a little tricky now, since, in a trice, both have become a mite more cumbersome.

I can hear the trees in the dark tonight, because there is a breeze. The slim hairy one garlanded with kids could not have heard them, not because there was no breeze, then, but because there were no trees, except for the giant acacia in the middle of the lawn, the focus of my eye-line for 28 years every time that, stumped, I looked up from the daily keyboard. Could be, what, a million times? Two million? A lot of stumping has gone on, up here. But all the other trees – the maple, the cedar, the cherry, the chestnut, the beech, the hawthorn, the fig, the crab apple, the eucalyptus, the thugia, the pear, the photinia – came to the garden in little tubs, and most of them are higher than this loft, now, which is why the breeze is having such sussurant fun in them. It is probably having so much fun that some of the leaves are falling, though I cannot see them, because what I can do is sniff autumn on that breeze, not the best of scents for mawkies. We should have sold the house in the spring, but the trees looked so good, and the lawn so lush, and the plants so buddie, that we thought, okay, house, one last summer.

There is only one song about Cricklewood. The wizards in the BBC archives found it for me a few years back, when I was, as so often, banging on about the place for Radio 4. Its opening couplet runs: ‘Cricklewood, Cricklewood, you stole my life away / For I was young and beautiful, but now I'm old and gray.' Not much of a song, perhaps, hardly one for Marie, but it'll do for me, tonight. It is time to close the typewriter and slip away. Tomorrow to fresh woods and crickles new.