The Broken Chariot (41 page)

‘Give 'er a break, though I wouldn't mind. I don't want too many, or I'll run out of beer money.' The train rattled through Euston and Camden Town. ‘I only know the middle of London from when I was in the army, but I don't think I'd like to live down 'ere.'

‘I'm not sure I like it all that much, either,' Herbert said. ‘I've got used to it, though.' Somewhere in the countryside might be more civilized, but he didn't feel ready for it yet.

‘I suppose you 'ave. But you know, Bert, when you was in the factory and one of us, I allus knew you were up to summat and wouldn't stay forever. I couldn't be sure what it was, but you was different, and that was a fact. You used to try and hide it, but not from me you couldn't. I got the first clue when you wanted that typewriter.'

Herbert put a hand on his shoulder. ‘And I knew you knew, but there was nothing I could tell you at the time.'

‘I expect you thought it'd put you off your stroke. I'd 'ave called you a bleddy liar, anyway.'

Herbert laughed. ‘Come on, we get out here.'

He looked on his bijou garden flat as the height of fine accommodation in crowded expensive London. Whatever family he came from, he had never expected such light and space for his own exclusive use. Archie's almost unnoticeable look around brought nothing like: what a marvellous place, you've really dropped into it you lucky dog, how much does it cost a day? He behaved, or so Herbert liked to think, in the same way as Bert would in a similar situation if Archie had won the pools.

Archie picked up
The Times Literary Supplement
. ‘What the fuck's this newspaper?'

He had meant to stow it away. ‘It's all about books. Let's have some coffee, shall we?'

‘Yeh, I was up at six this morning. A lot of the blokes at work read your book,' he went on when Herbert came back from the kitchen.

Herbert stopped halfway in pouring the coffee. ‘Did they like it?'

‘Mostly. But one or two said you was giving them a bad name, about knocking on with other women. I towd the sanctimonious bastards to 'ave more sense. It worn't about them at all, I said. You'd made it all up. But they wouldn't believe me. They swore they kept recognizing themselves. I thought when I saw you I'd tell you, so's we could have a good laugh about it.'

Herbert wondered why he had never been able to match the fluency of Archie's lingo, whereas the screed at his desk came out with no trouble. Being on guard during speech could explain it, but not near as convincingly as that the language had never belonged to him. Reality couldn't finally exist independent of birthright. ‘I suppose I'd better wear glasses and a false beard if I come up for a visit,' he said when they stopped laughing, ‘or I'll get duffed up.'

‘Nah! But don't yer mean when you come to hear more o' them lovely stories?'

‘There is that, as well.'

‘Yer did mek most of 'em up, though, didn't yer?' he winked. ‘If ever you want any more, just let me know. They grow on trees where I come from.'

After a session at Dirty Dick's, and a meal upstairs, they traipsed back to Liverpool Street and got on the Underground for Tower Hill, quiet for the most part since neither by now had much else to say. Archie wanted to see the Crown Jewels and the Chamber of Horrors, and Herbert was glad to go, because he would never see such things otherwise. A boat to Charing Cross pier set them on a walk through Trafalgar Square to Piccadilly, which gave enough to talk about, Herbert telling Archie the story of his life.

They swing-doored into the Hyde Park Hotel, agreeing that enough had been done of London to last a long time. A thin young man at the piano tinkled out ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow'. ‘We can get a hearty tea here.'

‘I'm ready for it.' Archie sat on a short sofa by one of the side tables, which gave a view of the ‘talent' walking through to the rooms of the hotel. Niches to either side were filled with mirrors, in one a gigantic spray of orange and purple flowers. By the far wall square glass-topped tables were placed as if for writing at, each white sphere bulb making little impression because the salon was lit whiter from overhead than day outside.

Two dowager-looking women at the next table talked about their daughters who were soon to be married. Archie finished gazing. ‘Do you have your tea here a lot?'

Herbert laughed. ‘I've been a couple of times before, once with my girlfriend.'

‘You dirty dog! When are you going to marry her?'

He signalled the waiter. ‘Well, I'm thinking about asking her.'

‘On'y thinkin'? Do it. Join the club. You'll never regret it.' He leaned across: ‘Does she know all about what yer towd me just now?'

‘I think she suspects. Some of it.' It was his problem, and nobody else's, certainly not Archie's. ‘I like this place. Thought you'd like to see it, and get away from the crowds on the street.'

‘As long as they mash a good pot of tea.'

‘I think they do.'

‘You'd better tell her, though. There shouldn't be any secrets between man and wife.'

‘I know.'

Archie looked again at the mirrors and upholstery, at the orange globe lamps on expanding wooden tripods, and up at the flatly arched ceiling with yellow and orange panes of glass in the centre. ‘Who pays the bloke at the jo-anna?'

Assailed by ‘Tea For Two', Herbert speculated as to whether his parents had come here after seeing him off to boarding school. ‘The hotel, I suppose.'

‘He's good, not like some of the ivory bashers up in Nottingham. I like the old tunes, though. They mek me think of the days before the war,' he nudged, ‘when we was clambed half to death.' A waiter in coat tails took their order for two full teas. ‘Looks like he's got a ramrod up his arse.'

‘Probably has.' Herbert laughed with him. I'm loosening up, he noted, enjoying himself again. The Australian girl must have gone on her travels. Archie would have fancied her.

‘I prefer my job to his,' Archie said. ‘I suppose he earns a lot more than I do, but fancy relyin' on tips.'

Herbert lifted the silver teapot with a folded napkin. ‘Somebody has to do it.'

The hot handle didn't bother Archie. ‘You've got soft.'

‘I suppose I have.'

‘No, I don't mean it. You're as hard as nails, Bert. Inside, anyway. But I'm glad you brought me here. I'm not bluffin'. I'm enjoyin' every minute of it.'

A longing in Archie's tone concealed a wish, Herbert thought, to see more and know more and feel more, a wish close to envy except that it had come from the heart. The fact that he could never grow into the life in no way lessened the sense of wanting to, and yet, if he won a million pounds, he would be a different man in a year, taking to a moneyed existence as if born to it. ‘We'll do it again. Any time you can get down.' You're my friend for life. ‘Bring Mary and the kids, if you like.'

Archie gave a familiar bang on the shoulder. ‘She might fall for you and your posh life, and then where would I be? Anyway, yo' cum up to see us sometime, and it'll all be on me.'

‘I will, you can bet on that.' But would he? Would he ever want to, or be able to? What would Deborah think of it up there? They'd go, nevertheless. He'd make sure to.

‘I won't let the lads rip yer to bits,' Archie said.

They fell to laughing again, a few sour glances from the next table, one of the women reminding Herbert of his mother. ‘Let's get this down us,' Archie said. ‘Looks good. A thing I ain't told yer yet, Bert, is that I'm to be a shop steward at the firm. One o' the union blokes had a word with me the other night.'

‘It took 'em long enough,' Bert said, as they settled down to the minuscule triangular sandwiches, and the scones, butter and jam, which called for more or less silence.

After a bath in the hottest water he donned a plaid dressing gown (a present from Deborah) and ate his cooked breakfast. Newspapers pushed through the door were read as quickly as he could flip the pages. The dream state had become normal life.

By ten he had put on a suit and Windsor-knotted his tie, polished his shoes, and sat at the desk to sort mail. Requests for talks and autographs were replied to, an onerous duty, and he cursed an upbringing which stipulated that every letter be answered. He paper-clipped a couple of fivers to a letter, and posted them to Isaac in his new council flat.

A magazine editor asked for a story, so he scanned one of the sketches slopped into his notebook over the years and worked it suitably up, putting it through the mill of his new Olivetti typewriter. He set it aside for posting to his agent, with an attached note saying that whatever sum was offered he should get double or else.

He dressed up because you never knew who might knock at the door and want to see an author at work. It could be someone who had admired his glistening green underslung road dog by the kerb, and clawked his initials on it. If any such caller found him slopping around unshaven, in a ragged old jersey and egg-stained trousers – after a lifetime's work in overalls – they would have little confidence in his future as a novelist.

A working-class writer dressed in anything other than a three-piece suit would give the impression of being a vile trickster. And since he was, that wouldn't do at all. Londoners weren't as daft as Bert had often wound himself up to assume, or as they often enough looked and were. Nor was Herbert Thurgarton-Strang so unknowing as to look down on anyone before they had revealed themselves as such. You had to treat people as if they knew everything, just as you wanted them to believe you knew everything. All in all, such thoughts were a wasteful way of passing the time, and he was glad to be interrupted by Dominic Jones, walking down the steps towards his garden flat. He decided to let Bert open the door. ‘Hello, shag! Cum for a coffee?'

He sat comfortably in the armchair and opened
The Times
, irritating Herbert by making himself so free. Coming back from the kitchen he noticed how much weight he'd put on, cheeks puffier and skin more pallid. The white woollen fisherman's sweater under his jacket, and a pair of overall trousers called ‘jeans', was a rig Herbert could only wear when it would no longer be suspect on someone like him. Anyway, who would tolerate overalls when you could afford something else? He passed his old friend a mug of coffee. ‘What's up, tosh? Bad news from the firm?'

Herbert recalled their days at school, when Dominic had been a trusting pal, cherubic features turned up with an almost worshipping expression. My raddled phizog must bring back the same reflections in him. Dominic's eyes went positively piggy when he began to speak. ‘I don't know how you got into all this proletarian writer business, Herbert, but I think it's time I let you know that I suspected you from the first.'

He was glad he had given him a spoonful of Distant instead of grinding the best coffee. ‘You are a vile little rat, aren't you?'

He threw the
Times
down pettishly. ‘Now you're sounding like your old self. It didn't take long, did it?'

‘I'll tek just as long as I like,' Bert snarled.

‘Well, you know,' he became more relaxed, a state which Herbert was dead set to alter, ‘it isn't fair to deceive people.'

‘What do you intend to do about it, you jumped-up publisher's pimp? I didn't think they paid you enough to suck their arses.' Stirring his coffee, Herbert went through the fantasy of murdering him and burying the corpse in the garden. A pleasant few minutes would be had, booting down the soil.

‘What you have done', Dominic went on, ‘is absolutely immoral, but at least I'd be interested to know how you did it. It wasn't a bad performance. The last time I saw you before you turned up at our office was when you absconded from school.' His face fizzled back into that of a frightened little boy. ‘You never wrote to let me know how you'd got on. They were the most miserable months of my life.'

‘I'm sorry about that. But I was too busy fitting into my new circumstances. I'll tell you how it was done, though.' He explained the metamorphosis, and at the end of his narrative didn't need to suggest he was more than halfway into another. ‘Don't you think it was something of an achievement, living two different lives for so long?'

‘I ought to, I suppose, but wouldn't it be even more of an achievement if you came clean, and told Humphries who you are?'

‘He wouldn't believe me, and even if he did he wouldn't want to. I'm making him too much money, and making too much myself. To tell him so that he would be absolutely convinced might give him a heart attack. Not that I'd be bothered about that, but he does have faith in me as Bert Gedling, and that's flattering to my vanity.'

‘You always had plenty of that.'

‘So I did. I'm a writer, after all. Which also means I'm amoral.' As time passed, however, he'd relax his guard, and blend with the surrounding milieu, be tamed and controlled by the sort of people he would need to mix with. By becoming one of them, they would stop commenting on how he dressed, especially when he allowed them to see what a good job he was making of his integration into the accepted way of life. As his accent became indistinguishable from theirs, his Thurgarton-Strang stridence would be taken as just another of Bert Gedling's affectations.

On the other hand if Dominic decided to rip his disguise clear with something like proof he would be tempted to dissimulate to the end. Few would believe such an outlandish story, or care to. He would drive the chariot of Bert across the heavens till it broke up, or Herbert brought the whole caboodle into a controlled landing. No matter what change came about in his novels and filmscripts (or even essays: he was collecting notes for ‘The Art and Metaphysics of Straight Narrative') he would never let them forget that plain Bert Gedling could come lumbering back into the ring any time he liked – whether to their amusement or dismay was no concern of his. ‘Why do you need to tell Humphries? I don't see what's in it for you.'