Life Goes On (10 page)

She pushed the cup aside and reached for a sheet of paper and a pen, obviously intending to write the farewell letter she had been thinking about since the day we were married. Her expression of disgust caused a pain in my heart. I had never seen such a sad and saintly face. Though she may have been miserable for reasons known only unto God, both of us were locked in it together, and her despondency stirred up my muddy love for her, a love that was part of my marrow. Anything else might lack reality, but not what I felt for her. Whatever she said or did, wherever she went, whatever happened to me or to the kids, my association with her would never cease to have been the most vital of my life. I looked at her longingly and secretly.

She wrote a few lines, stopped, and stared in my direction without seeing me. With mouth open and head drawn back, she laughed, her fair tresses hanging down, so loud that I heard her though I was outside. It was a laugh of blind malice. Perhaps she thought I was funny, pathetic and useless. Scorn brought out the happiness in her. I'd never seen her so happy. She looked like a young and carefree girl I had never known.

I wondered what crime I had committed to have been lumbered with the catastrophe of meeting her. She had ruined my life with her humourless domesticity. I hated her. She was laughing now, but I'd never heard her laugh at anything funny while with me – if anything funny was ever worth laughing at. In our life together she had trudged unlovingly along, enduring rather than enjoying, and then, a couple of weeks ago, without warning, when Smog wasn't too far from taking his A Levels, had lit off to Holland.

As if picking up my thoughts, she saw the framed photograph on the sideboard. I'd never liked it. For reasons known only to herself, she had set it there, a blown-up snapshot taken at Cromer by Smog with his first camera eight years ago. Bridgitte had refused to be in the photo because she was pregnant. She reached for the frame and cracked it on the corner of the chair. Then she hit harder, till nothing was left. She bent down, broad and luscious hips beam on, picked the ragged photograph from the bits of glass and threw it on the fire.

In a wild rage, ready to batter her to death, I kicked the door open. Striding through the hall I trampled over fifteen pairs of wellingtons, a corrugated footpath of walking sticks and umbrellas, a jungle of anoraks, and kneed so hard against the parlour door that the latch burst. I stood with fists raised, a pain in my feet because they weren't yet kicking her.

She faced me four-square, and shrieked, ‘Michael! You bastard!'

‘You bitch!' I cried.

‘Oh, my love,' she moaned, a glint in her eyes.

I reached out for her. ‘Darling!'

We practically ‘gonked on' in the middle of the suitcases, ‘gonked on' being a phrase Smog used as a youngster when he brought two trucks together on his model railway. He once stumbled into the bedroom when Bridgitte and I were ‘at it', and ever after would refer to the time we had been ‘gonked on'.

We stood, embracing and kissing, mumbling dozens of tender words, apologies mostly, endearments among the tears, promises of undying loyalty and love. ‘I'm so glad you came back,' she said. ‘Oh, Michael, Michael, Michael, I'll never stop loving you.'

‘I never did stop loving you. You're the one woman in my life.' The sound of something scraping along the floor like the enormous bandaged left foot of a mummy coming out of a pyramid broke into my consciousness. ‘Rich, ripe, wonderful, beautiful! My only possible sweetheart.'

I kept it up as long as I could without turning back into a baby in the playpen until Bridgitte, looking over my shoulder, stiffened at what she saw in the mirror. I felt a stinging blow from my ever loving wife who then, stepping back a few paces, stumbled over a suitcase. She righted herself. ‘Who's that?'

It had been obvious for some time who
that
was. First it was a suitcase, and then it was Maria, the waif I had rescued from a fate worse than death, pushing her luggage slowly across the threshold, panting as she did so.

‘It's someone I hired in London to clean up the house and to look after you and the kids when you got back from Holland. Her name's Maria. Maria,' I called, ‘this is Bridgitte my wife who I told you about. She'll show you what to do, though she may slap you around a bit in the process.'

Bridgitte stiffened, as if about to show Maria how right I was. But she held herself back. ‘So that's what you do? As soon as I go to see my parents for two weeks you run off and get another woman. I should have known.'

It was no use trying to be angry. Yet if I wasn't she would believe me even less. I gave her an equally stinging crack across the chops. ‘I was eating my heart out for you,' I said, ‘and only went to London this morning. I met Maria tonight on the Underground. She'd just lost her skivvying job and had nowhere to go. So I thought we could use her here. I decided you worked too hard. You needed help.'

Bridgitte was crying.

‘It's true.' Maria's tone was such that no one could disbelieve her, and I wanted to take her to bed from that moment on, but from that moment on knew I never would. ‘He help me.' She pushed her case to the wall, took off her coat, picked a chair from the floor and set it against the table. ‘Tomorrow, I leave,' she said. ‘But it true what Michael say. English people in Ealing no good. Woman shout at me. Don't feed me. Children scream and kick. Mr Horlickstone put hand up my clothes, get drunk, laugh at me and say he want to stroke my tits. Englishmen, no good.'

I don't know why, but these sentiments took Bridgitte's fancy, especially the bit about Englishmen being no good. She swabbed her big blue eyes, and I was left sitting among the wreckage while she and Maria went talking into the kitchen to get something to eat. An owl sounded from outside, and an occasional car bumped over our level crossing. I sat, conscious that I had done the wrong thing ten times over, and that I wasn't wanted on voyage. I would have gone back to London except that it was too late. In Soho things might just be starting to jump, but in the Fen country, after eight o'clock at night the social amenities of civilisation are rolled up like a carpet and put away till next day. I had to tolerate their crazy laughter while I went to my room and packed a case to take to my quarters at the Moggerhanger domain. Bridgitte would laugh on the other side of her face when I told her I'd found a job.

Downstairs, there wasn't a sight of suitcases or broken glass. The table was set for a meal,
hors d'oeuvres
already laid out in dishes and platters, a bottle of Dutch gin and a packet of Dutch cigars and a box of Dutch chocolates and a red football of Dutch cheese. I almost expected to see a salt cellar windmill, a clog full of radishes and a wimple hat sprouting tulips. I'd known Bridgitte so long that lovely Holland was almost as much in my blood as hers.

The smell of roasting meat suggested she had ripped something from the deep freeze as soon as she got back. I was the luckiest man alive to have a Dutch woman for a wife, whether she hated me or not, but how long this lunatic confrontation could go on I had no way of knowing. Bedtime was on the cards and, after the meal, we made the most of it.

The Railway Inn, just across the road from the station, had the slowest service of any pub in the area. A quick drink was more of a possibility the further you got from that particular pot-house, and if you thought you could run into the Railway Inn for a pint and pork pie before catching your train you were bound to miss it – unless you left everything half finished on the bar.

The jovial bastard who ran that pub must have doubled his profits from unfinished drinks. No wonder he called you ‘squire' and had his ninety-year-old mother serving behind the bar and washing the single glass they had for all their customers, while he looked out of the window at trains coming and going – mostly going – with a wide smile on his fat-chopped face. He had a sign saying ‘Quick Lunches' tacked up outside, but even a paper plate of soapy cheese and sliced miracle bread took half an hour to cough up. No wonder he kept pigs at the end of his ten-acre garden. They were fed on the fat of the land, and produced pork that tasted of raw onions. He was notorious in the area for making people miss their trains due to slow service, yet the pub was often full. Perhaps it was a mark of the times that people didn't mind if they lost their appointment in London. In Switzerland they'd have chucked him off the Matterhorn.

Bridgitte drove me there so that I could catch the twelve-thirty. She was in a good mood after our night of unsolicited passion. Often this wasn't the case, orgasms making her itchy and nervous, like a hangover, but perhaps breaking the news of my job at breakfast, as she came in with a platter of sliced cheese, cushioned her morning mood. I suppose it did mine, as well, because after so many years together they often coincided.

‘A job?' The shock was almost as great as the one I'd had when she went off to Holland. ‘What can you do?'

‘Chauffeur,' I said. ‘And it's living in. I'll only get home at weekends. Unless I work weekends. Then I'll get home in the week. I'll get home as often as I can.'

She had become a person of order in the last few years. She liked to live to a pattern, to know what was happening and exactly when. Uncertainty depressed and irritated her, as it would anybody, so the fact that she might not know when I would turn up made her spill coffee on the cloth. I soothed her by saying I would never come home unless I telephoned from London first.

‘And who are you working for?'

‘An English lord.' I forked up a slice of ham. ‘He'll pay two hundred and fifty pounds a month. It'll be very useful now that we're employing Maria.'

‘She's not working for us.'

In the pub I ordered two pints, and we sat at a table by the window. ‘Why not? She's a godsend.'

‘I'll let her stay a few days. That's all.'

‘She loves it at Upper Mayhem. She was as bright as a daffodil at breakfast. She likes you, anyway.'

‘I like her, but we can't afford to pay her, not on your two hundred and fifty pounds a month.'

I could have kicked myself, but sipped at the jar of ale and looked at the clock. There were ten minutes to go before the train came, and I had to buy my ticket. ‘I'll get enough money, don't worry. There'll be a bonus on top of my pay, every so often. Our financial worries are over.'

‘Lord who?' she asked.

I hoped she wouldn't recollect. ‘A chap called Moggerhanger. But I've got to go, or I'll be late.'

I waited for her to rage at my foolishness. ‘If you go to prison again, that's the end of us. You know that, don't you?'

‘Come off it,' I laughed. ‘Moggerhanger is an English lord. How can he do anything criminal? It's not like the sixties anymore. He's a reformed character. We all are.'

We had to get across to the station, so I picked up our glasses, the drink in them hardly touched, and followed Bridgitte to the door.

‘Squire!' the publican roared. ‘You can't take them glasses out there.'

I emptied the beer from both into a fever-grate, then took them back inside. ‘Sorry, squire!' I hee-hawed aloud at his fury. ‘Bit absent-minded these days.' Giving Bridgitte a quick kiss, I made a dash for the train.

A sixty-year-old grey-bearded chap in front of me emptied his leather purse on the counter and sorted his coins to decide whether any were false, in which case they were worth more than the real ones. I managed to get on board by jumping on the last carriage.

It would be untrue to say that nothing happened on the trip to London. Such a situation is unthinkable, certainly since Bridgitte had set the ball rolling by her strange behaviour in the last few weeks. But because events on the train had no bearing on subsequent occurrences, there's no point in retailing them, the plain fact being that I got back to Ealing just inside the twenty-four hours Moggerhanger had allowed me.

I'd thought of calling at Blaskin's to find out how Bill Straw was faring in his attic hideaway, but having got up so late after my night of homely passion with Bridgitte it hadn't been possible. Not that I worried about him. He would have to fend for himself, even if he did starve to death.

The flat over Moggerhanger's garage was furnished little better than Bill's pigeon coop. There were plain wooden planks on the floor, and the walls were whitewashed. If I wanted a face-swill there was a tap and sink in one corner. A single bed, a chair, a small table and a hotplate completed the amenities. For sleep there were two horse blankets, but no sheets. A forty-watt light-bulb hung on a wire from the ceiling, at which I assumed the electricity was included in my salary.

A red-white-and-blue biker's helmet with a hole in it was as far into a corner as it could get, as if it had been kicked there. I chose a paperback from a pile on the floor, and lay on the bed. Kenny Dukes's name was pencilled inside the cover. The story –
Orgy in the Sky
by Sidney Blood – seemed to be about a gang of five-year-old six-footers doing a warehouse robbery with a fight, a shoot-out and a fuck on every page. Towards the end, one or the other happened every second paragraph. Whenever it said something like ‘He smashed his fist into his smirking face' Kenny had underlined it as if wanting to commit the immortal words to memory. Heavy scoring in the margin highlighted an occasional comment like: ‘That's good!', so that with such marks the book was impossible to read without being brainwashed and ending up a replica of Kenny Dukes, the forty-year-old skinhead only half reformed. I honestly didn't know why Moggerhanger kept him on, because someone of his limited intelligence was bound to be more of a liability than an asset.

Maybe Kenny knew too much, and it would be embarrassing to do him in because he came from a very big family and was related to every thug in south London. Yet Moggerhanger had some affection for him, treasuring his qualities of loyalty and dumb violence. All I knew was that I didn't like Kenny Dukes and Kenny Dukes didn't like me, but as I considered myself to be at least six pegs above him in the social scale it was up to me to keep our relationship on a diplomatic if not friendly level.