The Broken Chariot (36 page)

‘Looking for something different now?'

‘I might be.'

He sipped his coffee. ‘You been in the army?'

‘I did three years, some of it in Cyprus.'

‘I suppose that's where you got that decoration on your cheek?' Glenny, a big man, tilted the chair, but came forward when a crack sounded somewhere in it. ‘Do you want to do some work for me?'

‘Doing what?'

‘Getting in the rents.'

‘Is that all?'

Glenny coughed. ‘There's one or two undesirables I need to deal with.'

‘Sounds good.' Life was scattered with signposts, the right or wrong one lightly followed. He saw himself as an ex-service thug with his own gang, hired by anyone who needed rough stuff to increase assets or further their careers. Any reinforcements he could get by asking Archie and a few others down from Nottingham. The picture wilted. ‘The only thing is I'm waiting to hear about another offer. Comes up in a fortnight.'

Glenny shook his head, disappointed. ‘Shame. Let me know if you think about it and change your mind.' His laugh was dry. ‘You'd be good at it, especially with that scar.'

Herbert liked the villain. ‘Thanks for the offer.'

He turned from the top of the stairs and grinned. ‘And thank you for the coffee. And I don't mind you using that hundred watt bulb.'

Motoring lessons were advertised in a shop window on Walworth Road for a pound an hour, and he booked half a dozen, to practise driving around London. After the first session the instructor guided him over the river and into the thick of it. ‘You've got the knack, pal.'

‘All I want to know is how to pass the test,' Herbert said sharply, stuck behind a post office van in High Holborn.

‘Oh, don't worry about that. You should get it first time.'

Thanks to Archie, but he wanted less talk and more knowledge. ‘We'll see.'

‘I know a nice car for sale, an Austin. Only a couple of hundred. You could practise all you liked, then.'

‘Without a licence?'

‘Get an international driving permit from the AA, then you can say you're on your way abroad if you get stopped by the law.'

‘No thanks.'

Between motoring practice he walked up Villiers Street by Kipling's digs, across the Strand with a wave at friendly Nelson to his left, a white atoll of cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Adept at artfully dodging buses he jinked through Lamb Passage (careful of his head) on to Floral Street, and cut up into Long Acre. Idleness, the freedom to do as he pleased, which he had been wanting all his life, gave a spring to his step by the post office, a different walk than after absconding from school and sending the missive to his parents.

Coming out of the National Gallery, with its vacuous and self-satisfied faces of the famous dead, he dropped a well-deserved sixpence to the bony old man in a blue beret chalking portraits on the flagstones. Brilliant colours delineated Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, Nelson, Wellington, Disraeli and other great personages, each powdery base to be washed away in the next downpour.

In Lyons on St Martin's Lane he sat down to the fuel of pie and mash, glancing from behind his
News Chronicle
at elegant office girls out for lunch. Isaac had told him with a laugh that you had to be wary of saying good day to a pretty girl in London in case you were accused of being a white slaver about to needle her with drugs and bundle her off to South America. Herbert wouldn't approach them anyway, whether from reticence after so long in the Midlands or because he was still uncertain as to who or what he would finally turn out to be. He only knew that he liked looking.

‘Don't you know me, then?' a woman called, when he was on the street and wondering which direction to go in next. The voice jerked his heart. He had heard it before, though this time the accent was different, the tone in no way vitriolic or accusing. She faced him. ‘You should.'

She was gloved and hatted, carried a Harrods' shopping bag, and a smart umbrella. An Italian leather reticule hung from the other arm, and her smile showed delight at the chance meeting. A boy of six, and a girl a little older, stood close, each in the stiff new clothes of their prep school. ‘It's a long time ago, I know, but I've often thought about you.'

‘So have I.' Her corn-dolly beauty had faded in ten years, but the make-up and smell of perfume attracted him. There seemed more of a gap in their ages compared to then, but he recalled her naked, and in every conceivable sexual position – as if it were yesterday now that he looked into her blue eyes and met the same intimate smile – the pines of Cyprus outside the room. Pangs of love and regret came from so long back, as she vividly recalled the times they'd had. Such memories were a luxury, blossoming out of instantaneous recognition. She laughed excitedly, and touched his arm. ‘I can't get over bumping into you like this. I knew you straightaway.'

He stroked his scar, as if to hide it, but she had already taken note. ‘It's amazing,' was all he could say for the moment.

‘Mummy,' the boy crowed, ‘will we be going soon?'

‘This is Samuel,' she pointed out. ‘And that's Dorothy.'

Sam sneered, and Dorothy glowered when he touched their heads.

‘Nice kids.'

‘They're terrors.' Her remark made them smile. ‘Are you happy these days?'

‘Very.' Herbert thought it a strange question. ‘How about you?'

‘Oh, absolutely.' Her lips told him otherwise, as she had meant them to, but who could be as happy as in the old days? ‘My husband has an accountancy firm,' she said, and asked what he was up to in Town. He told her most of what had happened since their affair. The girl put out her tongue from behind Alice's back, and Herbert glared, which delighted her.

‘Marvellous. You spent all that time on research in a factory? How brave! It must be good. I'll look out for the reviews. But call me whenever you like. Here's my number. My husband's a great reader, when he has time, so I'll buy him your book. We must go now: we're for the National Gallery, then I'm taking these despicable sprogs to tea – just so's they can be sick, I suppose.'

‘I'm not a sprog, I'm a schoolboy, aren't I, Dorothy?'

‘No,' she shouted piercingly, ‘you're a fat little sprog.'

‘I'll kill you when we get home.'

‘Oh no, not again,' she yawned, a pale but capable hand across her mouth.

Herbert smiled. ‘They must be a handful.'

‘Not really. I give them a good smack now and again.'

‘Yes, and it hurts,' Samuel shouted.

If I have children will they be Gedling or Thurgarton-Strang? Probably neither, he thought, though I don't suppose I will have any. He turned to Alice. ‘Buy a copy of my book for your husband if you like, but I'll send one for you alone.'

‘You are a darling.' In a lower voice: ‘I loved you, you know.'

‘I adored you,' he said. ‘I've always thought about you. None of it was forgotten.' It wasn't true, but the situation required such remarks from a Thurgarton-Strang, and maybe also from Bert Gedling. He wouldn't call on her, but the picture of doing so, and resuming their passion, and eloping, and setting up house (maybe in Cyprus) unrolled itself like an obligatory film. The last words out of the pathetic group hurrying away came from the boy who wanted to know about that man's scar, and Herbert assumed a passing bus muffled the smack Alice gave him.

During two hours' practice on the day before the motoring test he was caught in traffic along Piccadilly and around Trafalgar Square, which made him confident that he could drive anywhere without fear or hindrance. ‘I'll blind the bastards if I don't pass,' he said to his instructor, feeling as competent at the wheel as any of those brash pig-ignorant louts who had often tried to kill him on Belisha crossings in South London.

Ice-cold attention to the test course made him neither slow nor fast, as if the hypercritical eye of Archie overlooked him instead of the middle-aged jaundiced cloth-capped examiner with his little moustache and poised clipboard. A railway bridge, a blind corner, the slope for a hill start, an obstacle course of crossings and traffic lights along the main street, a circuit of the gasworks, and backing into a quiet avenue – all was normal and predictable. He could quote the Highway Code from start to finish and inside out.

The test man filled in a sheet of pink paper. ‘I have to tell you that you've passed' – as if his liver was going through the mincer with chagrin. Herbert supposed he was expected to jabber with gratitude, but his lips stayed locked as he took the permit, and gave a thumbs-up to the motoring school man by the kerb so that he could be driven back to his digs.

Twenty

People on the stairs made room for him so that Humphries at the top could grasp his hand and crow for everyone to hear: ‘Have you seen the reviews?'

‘No, I ain't.' Bert felt rough and surly, out of the sunlight into the hugger-mugger, the party no more than a chance to meet good-looking tarts from the office. Copies of the book had been displayed in shops for at least a week before publication. Herbert had seen a stack in a window on Southampton Row. ‘Is that by me? Did I write that?' ‘You fucking bet you did,' Bert told him. He stood back on the pavement for a wider view, Bert's gloating stamped out by a sneer from Herbert, and confirmed by the horn of a taxi that nearly took his heels off.

‘We've had three good ones so far, and I'm sure there'll be others.' He was disappointed by Bert's formal get-up, but Herbert knew that if he'd decked himself out in cap and muffler, and pulled a reluctant false pedigree whippet on a piece of old clothes line, people would begin to suspect, anyone in the know realizing that when a factory worker attended a party, or went out on a Saturday night, he wore the best in his wardrobe.

Humphries thought he looked like a slightly more eccentric Sir Richard Burton of Victorian exploring days – though without the beard – which was not surprising, since he had come from that largely unmapped expanse of territory beyond Potters Bar. Never mind, he'll seem the genuine article as soon as he opens his mouth. ‘I'll be introducing you to Jacob Wright later.'

Herbert, playing the part of Bert, felt threatened, disgruntled, almost paranoid among such people. Time must pass before a modification of his uncouth accent would seem a natural development of living in the south. ‘Who's 'e, then? Is 'e a window cleaner?'

‘Oh, no.' He wondered what the devil that could mean. ‘He's from
New Books Magazine
, a very influential rag. It should get you in all the libraries, including Boots, so talk to him. He wants to do a full page. They're even sending a photographer.'

‘I'm only interested in the crumpet.' Bert turned to a woman with shapely breasts and a beehive hairdo, offering glasses of wine. ‘What's yer name, duck?'

‘Fiona,' she smiled, moving on.

‘Maybe you'd rather have beer?' Humphries pointed to a gaggle of bottles on his desk. ‘We got these in specially.'

Bert took out his Waterman to script his moniker in a copy of
Royal Ordnance
for the firm's archives. ‘It's all right. This red vinegar's OK, but I'd like some chips wi' it the next time, and a bit o' salt.'

The book jacket showed a group of brutal-looking workmen standing by a machine – which could have been anything from a one-armed bandit to a coffee dispenser – undecided whether to dismantle the contraption and walk out with the bits under their coats, or pick up hammers and smash it to pieces as representing all that was ugly in their oppressed lives.

‘Like it?'

He didn't know what to say. Humphries obviously thought it was the best thing since he'd been to Rome on ten pounds and seen the Sistine Chapel. Herbert wouldn't look at such a cover on a shop table. He'd run a mile. It was ghastly. Even a half-undressed woman on the front would be better. ‘Love it.'

‘We all do.' He named the famous artist. ‘He did us a jacket for Walter Hawksworth's novel a few years ago. The book wasn't very good, though it sold well.'

Herbert was sure it did. Still, the cover wasn't the fault of his book, which he lifted high to examine as the one object that might join his disparate parts. The greater the distance between them the more he felt himself an author, whether Bert Gedling who everyone should be wary of (or feel superior to) or Herbert Thurgarton-Strang who carried a bag of iron filings in his soul. Either way, he sensed people's unease as he signed the book, and lifted another glass of wine as if such work was wearing to an extent that factory graft never could be, and he needed a reward for tackling the unfamiliar system with such panache. Despite its murkiness, the drink went down like a well-greased adder.

Dominic showed him into a small office. ‘It'll be quiet in here.'

Herbert wondered whether sharp questions on his past weren't about to commence, but Daniel Sloper the photographer turned Dominic and a couple of others out so that the flashing could happen in peace. ‘All the pictures I've ever 'ad took mek me look like the back end of a tram smash,' Bert grumbled.

‘These won't.' Sloper was a tall and well-stocked man in his twenties. He threw his brown leather jacket over a chair in the best motorbiker's style, but kept his silk scarf tied on like a Battle of Britain fighter pilot, which garment seemed to Herbert the social equivalent of his own white muffler.

Bert offered a glass from a tray of drinks on the desk. ‘Sup this, mate. It's good for a cough.'

‘Chin-chin, old boy!' Sloper took a modest swig and, as if knowing what real wine was, poured the remains into an ashtray. He set up screens and tripods, holding a light meter here and there, Herbert noting the thoroughness of a man who knew his trade. Using few words but with amiable and persuasive gestures, he got Bert to stand by the window, and then the door and, lastly, against a solid background of books. A dozen scar-side shots made Bert, in his formal suit and tie, look both villainous and interesting.