The Broken Chariot (33 page)

He should be on the stage. Humphries offered a cigar from his leather case. It's even better than too good to be true. They smoked in apparent peace. ‘Well, Mr Gedling – or may I call you Bert?'

Herbert nodded. ‘Any day.'

‘We'll draw up a contract and make an advance of two hundred pounds. Half now, and half on publication.'

‘For ten years work? Is that all authors mek on a long book like this?'

‘You'll earn more when the royalties start coming in.'

Bert detected a fear on Humphries' part that he might reach for his novel and march off with it elsewhere. ‘That's only a promise, though. You can't live on promises.'

‘It's more than that, I think. Do you have an agent?' – as if he could deal with him or her more easily.

Ash fell from Bert's cigar, such a good Cuban it didn't break on impact but lay like a turd on the carpet. He put his foot on it for luck. ‘My lawyer will look at the contract. He knows all about book advances. But I did think five 'undred would be nearer the mark.' Herbert could live a year on that, with care. ‘That's what he said when I showed him your letter.'

Humphries put the ashtray between them. ‘Has he read it – the book, I mean?'

‘Loves it. Reckons it's as good as owt that moaning minnie D. H. Lawrence wrote, though I suppose he was having me on.' Herbert could see him trying to decide whether he was bluffing or just being naive. Dense thoughts were struggling around in the compost of Gedling's brain, which made him unpredictable, untrustworthy.

Humphries wondered with a
frisson
what F. R. Leavis would say to his views on Lawrence. Though clearly from the boondocks, Gedling was no fool, and in spite of the clarity of his writing there was something sly about him, which may be no bad thing when, Humphries thought, we put him through the publicity machine. ‘I'll tell you what we'll do, Bert. As a gesture of confidence and goodwill, and to show our faith in you, we'll make it three hundred – if I'm able to square it with the other directors, which I think I can.'

Herbert had hit as much of a jackpot as the one-armed bandit could deliver, but it was even so beyond what he had hoped for. He asked, as if still not satisfied: ‘When will you publish the book, then?'

Humphries barked into an intercom for a sheet of schedules. ‘I want you to know, Bert, that we have a policy here of treating our authors with decency and respect. We look after them, but expect loyalty in return.'

A better-looking girl than the female Cerberus on the front door came in with the schedules. ‘Thank you, Deborah.' He flipped through the papers. ‘We'll bring
Royal Ordnance
out in the autumn,' he told her, ‘which gives us about six months, plenty of time to get advance copies to the reviewers.'

‘Deborah, eh?' Bert said, when she had gone. ‘A bit of all right, in't she?' Cool and haughty Deborah in her purple blouse, with a nice golden trinket between her tits, had given him a quick look, and assumed it told her everything about him, but once outside she would realize that such was not the case. If – no, when – he met her again that kind of uncertainty would give him half a chance.

‘She's one of our up-and-coming editors,' Humphries said.

The curt tone was a good reason for Bert to frown: ‘Autumn's a long way off. I was thinking a couple of months would do the trick.' He stretched his legs from the sofa, and blew a perfect smoke ring towards the fireplace. ‘I might 'ave another done by then.'

‘That's all right. We can bring it out next year. Do you have a title?'

A photograph of Rodin's
Thinker
, seen in a book at Isaac's, showed the attitude to take, until the words flashed into his brain. ‘Ye', I'll call it
The Other Side of the Tracks
.'

‘No resting on your laurels, eh? That's good. And in the meantime you'll go on working in the factory, I suppose?'

The country house he'd buy would have a well-shaved lawn you went on to from French windows. There'd be a table, and a sunshade under which he'd scribble tales from the factory on to a foolscap pad so that the sunshine breeze couldn't flush the papers away. A middle-aged motherly housekeeper would disturb him with the musical tinkle of a tea tray, or perhaps wake him from an illicit snooze. Maybe his good luck and swelling fortune would run to a flat above the National Gallery, with a view almost level with Nelson's melancholy phizog. In the morning he'd amble across the Square in his dressing gown and carpet slippers to eat breakfast in Joe Lyons, a friendly nod at the policeman who'd soon get used to such eccentricity: ‘Nice morning, Mr Gedling!' ‘Would be, if I hadn't drunk so much last night.' ‘Ah! You authors!'

On the other hand maybe he'd live half-starved in a furnished room for the rest of his days, and struggle with the poverty he'd read about in George Gissing's books. ‘The factory's all I know. Unless I pack it in and get a job as a clay-kicker down the pit. The money's better there, better than writing novels, any road up.'

Humphries clasped hands, and Herbert could never see such a man feeling contrite at the thought of a writer on his uppers. ‘I don't think you'll have to do that kind of work much longer.'

‘I hope not. I've done my bit.'

‘Before you go, though' – he pressed a button – ‘I'd like you to meet my chief editor, who wrote such an enthusiastic report on your novel.'

Herbert lay back, uninterested, smoking at his ease, when who should walk in but that wanking little blighter Dominic Jones, who had been his best friend at school. Bert considered himself to be in the shit bucket up to his neck, at the same time realizing that publishing was just the sort of occupation in which to find someone like Dominic. So, he told himself, get deeper ever deeper into Bert as quickly as you can, though even Archie's skin might not be thick enough to hide in.

‘Dominic, I'd like you to meet Bert Gedling, who wrote
Royal Ordnance
that you admired so much.'

Bert uncoiled himself to greet this pink plump man of middle height, already slightly bald, but spiffingly dressed, as they would have put it during those long ago days at school. ‘Hey up, Domino.'

The same old baby face, but turning to petulance. ‘Dominic, if you don't mind.'

It was him, right enough. Bert corkscrewed so deeply into Gedling that his own mother wouldn't have known him or, better still, he wouldn't even have spotted himself walking along the street. ‘Sorry, I thought it was Domino. They 'ave funny names down in London.' He used the grip of a million handlepower, so that Dominic needed all his spartan school upbringing not to flinch at the pain. He couldn't possibly connect Bert with the Thurgarton-Strang whose contemptuous handshake had never been more than the extension of one finger, and who he had last seen playing table tennis in the games room more than twelve years ago. The scar helped, as did the muffler, the calloused hands and hardened face, the half-closed eyes, and one or two blackheads cultured for the occasion.

Dominic backed a pace. ‘It's certainly a good novel. Unusual, too.'

‘That's high praise,' Humphries said, ‘coming from him. It's only the third book he's accepted since the new year. What did you say about it?'

‘A real achievement, both as art and realism.' He looked at Herbert, but then, he would, wouldn't he? Herbert felt the horizons spinning, the room in a flux, as if he had put back six pints of Younger's Number One, and never drunk anything more potent than cocoa before. Bert was reluctant to come up and help keep the perilous world at bay, but Herbert kept him up front by the scruff of his neck.

‘I was talking about it with someone at Penguin's yesterday,' Dominic said, ‘in Chez Victor's.'

‘Were you, then?' Humphries leaned against the desk, hoping his chief editor would have enough diplomatic sense to handle the kind of rogue element carefully that neither of them had met before. ‘They'll have first refusal on the paperback rights, but only if they're quick about it, and if they come up with the right price.'

‘Penguins!' Bert exclaimed, in control again. ‘I thought they on'y touched classics. I've read all of them, though.' The more mystified they were about his ability to produce a book from such a background the less they would imagine him to be who he really was, in which case Herbert could afford to throw out a few hints now and again as to how cultured he was. ‘I'll 'ave to be off soon. I want to get back up north before my lawyer shuts 'is offices.'

He felt absolute joy, walking arm in arm with Bert in the sunshine up St Martin's Lane, both too full of their success to get straightaway back into the Underground. Such freewheeling happiness made his strides seem ten feet long, no one nearby coming up to his measure. ‘We did it, old boy, we pulled it off,' Herbert said.

‘Fuckin' did,' Bert crowed. But a cloud went over his face: ‘What about that snotchops who looked a bit funny when 'e saw yer, though?'

‘Oh, you mean that little twerp Dominic? Don't worry about him. I'll deal with him when the time comes.'

‘Yer'll have ter watch 'im, is what I think. Trouble is, 'e in't as daft as he looks.'

‘I assure you, he is. I know him from a long time ago.'

‘Do yer? Where was that, then? You aren't 'oldin' summat back from me, are yer?'

A steely tone came into Herbert's voice. ‘That's none of your business. Don't get too uppity with me, Bert Gedling, or I'll close the lid on your box.'

The doppelgänger had worked overtime and been convincing, and would stay in control only as long as he needed it. No doubt Dominic would say to Humphries that Bert Gedling put him in mind of someone at his old school. ‘So much so that it's damned uncanny, though of course it can't be him. It's impossible, unthinkable, idiotic to suppose so' – which would set Humphries laughing so loud and long as to bring on an epileptic fit.

Eating a dismal sandwich in the station buffet, Herbert's elation declined. His apparently successful deception seemed to have cheated him of a proper achievement, and he wondered what the result would have been had he called on them as Herbert Thurgarton-Strang, and haw-hawed with his old public school swagger.

Such metronomic moods never let him enjoy anything for long, so he slept all the way back, the ordeal having been more exhausting than he could have imagined.

He poured from the half-bottle of White Horse. ‘I'm a working-class novelist to them, you see, and they only know me as Bert Gedling.'

‘Instead of someone of impeccable military and clerical descent?' Isaac put water into his glass. ‘It's a bit too strong for me.' He sipped. ‘I don't see the problem, though. You've made your bed, and now you have to lie in it. What's wrong with that?'

‘I'll get used to juggling the pair of us, I suppose.'

‘You've done quite well so far.'

‘But why do I suddenly feel uneasy about lying?'

‘Success brings its uncertainties. It needs more strength of character than failure.'

‘Maybe I should have been an actor.'

‘You'd have been a bad one,' Isaac said, ‘because your life wouldn't have depended on it. Not like your writing.'

Herbert slowed down on the whisky, not caring to get Bert pie-eyed – though he felt like swigging the lot. ‘You probably know more about me than anybody else.'

‘Perhaps, but don't worry about it.'

‘You should have been the writer, not me.'

Isaac took a clean handkerchief to his spectacles, of the sort made from wire and always about to fall to pieces. ‘I couldn't write to save my life.'

‘Well, you're acute about other people, you've read far more than me, and you know a lot about human nature.'

He smiled. ‘I knew you'd make one sooner or later, though. You've got everything it takes: education, confidence, experience, imagination, and a split personality. You seem to dislike most people, except those you write about, which is one way of saving your soul. Anyway, we'd better read that contract, clause by tricky clause, so that we can make sense out of it, and see that it's all shipshape and correct. Open your Bert Gedling writing pad, and we'll get cracking.'

Eighteen

‘Are summers longer than winter?' Archie said.

Diagrams of astronomy were drawn across Herbert's mind from school: the earth rotates on its own axis in a left-hand annual orbit around the sun; but he'd forgotten the dates of the equinoxes. ‘Maybe just a bit.' He smiled. ‘The days are longer, though, especially in the afternoon.'

‘I know that,' Archie said.

‘Does it bother you?'

‘Well, today I don't want it to get dark, but some days I can't wait.'

‘You're a dirty old man,' Bert said.

‘I'm not, I'm a dirty young 'un. I will be a dirty old man, though, when I'm old.'

‘You're hopeless,' Bert twitted.

‘I know. It's lovely. I like meeting a woman in the dark.'

Chitchat against the wall, the same as ever, not many variations but it carried the time along between canteen and hooter. With hardly a cloud in the sky, the yards and sheds of the factory seemed to function better in the sun than under the mists of winter, when it looked what it was, a slum that should be swept away. The signal went for getting back to work. ‘I sometimes think that if I hear that moaning minnie one more time I'll go off my head.'

‘I'll live to see the day,' Bert said. ‘Come on.'

He had been given lighter work because of his injured arm, which wasn't yet healed. No one doubted when he told them, though it was true enough. He serviced other people's machines, pushed trolleys up and down the gangways, and checked finished material before it was taken away, feeling at times as if he had never written a novel, or been to London, as if the life of writing couldn't possibly be part of him. Such blank moments worried him that he might sink into being Bert Gedling and no one else forever. There were times when he hated the name.