The Pigeon Tunnel (30 page)

Yet he remained, which was his genius, to all outward appearances a most respectable man. Respect, not money, was what he cared for above everything. Every day he had to have his magic recognized. His judgement of other people depended entirely on how much they respected him. At the humble level of life, there's a Ronnie in every second street in London, in every county town. He's the back-slapping, two-fisted tearaway naughty boy with a touch of the blarney, who throws champagne parties for people who aren't used to being
given champagne, opens his garden to the local Baptists for their fête though he never sets foot inside their church, is honorary president of the boys' football team and the men's cricket team and presents them with silver cups for their championships.

Until one day it turns out he hasn't paid the milkman for a year, or the local garage, or the newspaper shop, or the wine shop, or the shop that sold him the silver sports cups, and maybe he goes bankrupt or goes to jail, and his wife takes the children to live with her mother, and eventually she divorces him because she discovers – and her mother knew it all along – that he's been screwing every girl in the neighbourhood and has kids he hasn't mentioned. And when our naughty boy comes out or gets himself temporarily straight, he lives small for a while and does good works and takes pleasure in simple things, till the sap rises again and he's back to his old games.

My father was that fellow, no question, all of the above. But that was only the beginning. The difference is in scale, in his episcopal bearing, his ecumenical voice and his air of injured sanctity when anyone dares to doubt his word, and his infinite powers of self-delusion. While your run-of-the-mill naughty boy is blowing the last of the housekeeping money on the three-thirty handicap at Newmarket, Ronnie is relaxing serenely at the big table in Monte Carlo with a complimentary brandy-and-ginger in front of him, with myself aged seventeen and pretending to be older, seated on one side of him and King Farouk's equerry, aged fifty-plus, on the other. The equerry is most welcome at this table. He has bought it many times over. He is polished, grey-haired, innocuous and very tired. The white telephone at his elbow links him directly to his Egyptian king, who is surrounded by astrologers. The white phone rings, the equerry removes his hand from his chin, raises the receiver, listens with his long eyelids lowered and dutifully transfers another chunk of the
wealth of Egypt to red, or black, or whatever number is considered propitious by the zodiacal wizards of Alexandria or Cairo.

For some while now Ronnie has been observing this process, a combative little smile to himself that says, ‘If that's the way you want it, old son, that's the way it's got to be.' And he starts to raise his own bids around the table. Purposefully. Tens become twenties. Twenties, fifties. And as he splashes out the last of his chips and beckons imperiously for more, I realize he is not playing a hunch, or playing the house, or playing the numbers. He is playing King Farouk. If Farouk favours black, Ronnie goes for red. If Farouk backs odd, Ronnie raises him on even. We are talking hundreds by now (these days thousands). And what Ronnie is telling His Egyptian Majesty – as a term's worth, then a year's worth, of my school fees vanish into the croupier's maw – is that Ronnie's line to the Almighty is a great deal more efficacious than some tin-pot Arab potentate's.

In the soft blue twilight of Monte Carlo before dawn, father and son saunter side by side along the esplanade to a twenty-four-hour jeweller's shop to pawn his platinum cigarette case, gold fountain pen and wristwatch. Bucherer? Boucheron? I'm warm. ‘Win it all back tomorrow with interest, right, old son?' he says as we retire to bed in the Hôtel de Paris, where he has mercifully prepaid our room bills. ‘Ten o'clock sharp,' he adds severely, lest I am thinking of malingering.

So I am born. Of my mother, Olive. Obediently, with the haste Ronnie has demanded of her. In a final push to forestall creditors and prevent Mr Humphries from catching his death while he crouches outside in his Lanchester. For Mr Humphries is not just a cab driver but a valued confederate, as well as a fully paid-up member of the exotic Court with which Ronnie surrounds himself, and a distinguished amateur conjuror who does tricks with bits of rope like hangman's nooses. In high times he is replaced by Mr Nutbeam and
a Bentley, but in low times Mr Humphries with his Lanchester is always ready to oblige.

I am born, and packed up with my mother's few possessions, for we have recently suffered another bailiff's visitation and are travelling light. I am loaded into the boot of Mr Humphries' taxi like one of Ronnie's contraband hams a few years hence. The brown boxes are thrown in after me and the lid of the boot is locked from the outside. I peer around in the darkness for a sign of my elder brother, Tony. He is not in evidence. Neither is Olive, alias Wiggly. Never mind, I have been born and, like a brand-new foal, am already on the run. I have been on the run ever since.

I have another confected childhood memory that, according to my father, who had every right to know, is equally inaccurate. It is four years later and I am in the city of Exeter, walking across a patch of wasteland. I am holding the hand of my mother, Olive, alias Wiggly. As we are both wearing gloves, there is no fleshly contact between us. And indeed, so far as I recall, there never was any. It was Ronnie who did the hugging, never Olive. She was the mother who had no smell, whereas Ronnie smelled of fine cigars, and pear-droppy hair oil from Taylor of Old Bond Street, Court Hairdressers, and when you put your nose into the fleecy cloth of one of Mr Berman's tailored suits you seemed to smell his women there as well. Yet when, at the age of twenty-one, I advanced on Olive down No. 1 platform at Ipswich railway station for our great reunion after sixteen hugless years, I couldn't work out for the life of me where to grab hold of her. She was as tall as I remembered her, but all elbow and no huggable contours. With her toppling walk and long, vulnerable face she could have been my brother Tony in Ronnie's legal wig.

I am in Exeter again, swinging on Olive's gloved hand. At the far side of the wasteland is a road from which I see a high, red brick wall with spikes and broken glass along its top, and behind the wall a
grim flat-fronted building with barred windows and no light inside them. And in one of these barred windows, looking exactly like a Monopoly convict when you go directly to jail, without passing go or collecting two hundred pounds, stands my father from the shoulders up. Like the Monopoly man, he is clutching the bars with both big hands. Women always told him what lovely hands he had and he was forever grooming them with clippers from his jacket pocket. His wide, white forehead is pressed against the bars. He never had much hair, and what there was of it ran fore and aft over his crown in a tight black, sweet-smelling river, stopping short of the dome that did so much for his saintly image of himself. As he grew older, the river turned grey, then dried up altogether, but the wrinkles of age and dissolution that he had so richly earned never materialized. Goethe's Eternal Feminine prevailed in him till the end.

He was as proud of his head as he was of his hands, according to Olive, and soon after their marriage mortgaged it for fifty pounds to medical science, cash in advance and the goods to be delivered on his death. I don't know when she told me this, but I know that from the day this knowledge was entrusted to me, I eyed Ronnie with something of the detachment of an executioner. His neck was very broad, hardly a kink where it joined his upper body. I wondered where I would aim the axe if I were doing the job. Killing him was an early preoccupation of mine, and it has endured off and on even after his death. Probably it is no more than my exasperation that I could absolutely never pin him down.

Still clutching Olive's gloved hand, I wave at Ronnie high up in the wall and Ronnie waves the way he always waved: leaning back and with the upper body dead still while one prophetic arm commands the skies above his head. ‘Daddy, Daddy!' I yell. My voice is a giant frog's. On Olive's hand I march back to the car feeling thoroughly pleased with myself. Not every small boy, after all, has his mother to himself and keeps his father in a cage.

But, according to my father, none of this happened. The notion that I might have seen him in any of his prisons offended him very
much – ‘Sheer invention from start to finish, son.' All right, he conceded, he did a bit of time in Exeter, but mostly he was in Winchester and the Scrubs. He'd done nothing criminal, nothing that couldn't have been sorted out between reasonable people. He'd been in the position of the office boy who'd borrowed a few bob from the stamp box and been caught before he had a chance to put them back. But that wasn't the point, he insisted. The point, as he confided to my half-sister Charlotte, his daughter by another marriage, when he was complaining about my generally disrespectful behaviour towards him – i.e. I wouldn't give him a cut of my royalties or put up a few hundred thousand to develop a nice bit of green belt he'd gulled out of some misguided local council – the point
was
that anyone who knows the inside of Exeter jail knows perfectly well you can't see the road from the cells.

And I believe him. Still. I'm wrong and he was right. He was never at that window and I never waved to him. But what's the truth? What's memory? We should find another name for the way we see past events that are still alive in us. I
saw
him in that window but I also
see
him there now, grasping the bars, his bull's chest encased in the convict's uniform, with arrows printed on it, as worn in all the best school comics. There is a part of me that never afterwards saw him wearing anything else. And I know I was four years old when I saw him because a year later he was at large again, and a few weeks or months after that my mother slipped away in the night, disappearing for sixteen years before I rediscovered her in Suffolk, the mother of two other children who had grown up unaware of their half-brothers' existence. She took with her one fine white hide suitcase by Harrods, silk-lined, which I found in her cottage when she died. It was the only thing in the whole house that bore witness to her first marriage, and I have it still.