The Broken Chariot (32 page)

Dark hair, straight nose, forceful chin, and the cul de sac of a scar showed a self-engrossed though raddled aspect. A smile gave the image a facile supercilious charm which would deceive nobody, certainly not him. He was amused that
cul de sac
backwards produced (more or less)
cased luc(k)
; which sign caused him to hope that the cul de sac he was caught in would turn into an open street, on which his luck would begin to change.

The mirror also reflected how his face might seem to others, because all the people he had ever looked at were in some way embedded there, which made it more of his own face than ever. Such switchings of template took place without his awareness, and turning his head from side to side, as if to discover how and why, was a gesture which further emphasized who he was.

The reflected image was made up of too many faces because the one that indubitably belonged to him had behind it all those people who, in his novel, had been through happiness and sorrow due to his god-like devising, though the basic aspect was as much under his control as the chariot of a Phaeton arriving successfully at the end of the day.

If his face seemed a mass of contradictions at certain moments there was a discipline within which could always bring it back to one he recognized, because whatever he cared to read there showed it could be no other than his own face, whether the roughneck Bert Gedling or the superior Thurgarton-Strang. Only a member of the elect could look in a mirror and realize there were many versions of his face instead of, like any oaf of the common run, thinking it complete and in no way puzzling.

He wrapped himself in the cold bedding and reached for the almost shredded copy of
Caged Birds
, to indulge in a soothing read, until his eyes would no longer obey his will, and he was so warmly asleep that he failed to hear Mrs Denman calling him down for supper.

Part Three

Seventeen

The publisher's letter said they would appreciate him calling, at a mutually convenient time and date, when they might, after some discussion, be prepared to make an offer on his book. During days of fever the words shot and spiralled around his brain like fiery arrows, always reforming at a distance his arms couldn't reach nor his eyes decipher. When his mind cooled back to equilibrium he thought that whoever had dictated such stilted language must have been to a similar school to his own. But then, maybe they all had in that particular trade.

Knowing the letter by heart, he sent every bit from the window while passing St Albans, and opened the
Evening Post
to gloat over Cecilia's marriage to her middle-aged company director. Director? As they said about one who strutted around the factory, he couldn't direct a trolley from one end of the firm to the other without getting lost, unless it was loaded with bags of somebody else's money and he was going in ever-diminishing circles in the hope of reaching an exit.

If you looked at the photograph one way the man was handsome and self-assured, while squinting at it with one eye closed he seemed furtive and lecherous, and well on the way to being sent down for embezzlement. At the risk of thinking himself mean and despicable Herbert finally considered the man to be a type eminently suitable for Cecilia who, in her virginal wedding dress, would no doubt become a fitting partner for him.

A woman opposite, who he was starting to see as the spitting image of Eileen's apparent reappearance by the town hall lions after he came back from the army, disturbed the recollection of his perfect afternoon with Cecilia on the hillside near Gotham, which had culminated in his sublime eye-contact with the fox. He saw again the clean orange flame of its pelt framed in green, snout to the wind and turned towards prey. Yet its instinct had been defective in not spotting the entwined bodies of two lovers. Even a fox made mistakes.

‘What time does this train get to London, duck?'

‘How do I know?' Bert snarled.

‘Sorry, I was on'y askin'.'

So as to look more like Bert Gedling than Herbert Thurgarton-Strang he stood before a glass at St Pancras to set his cap at an angle, though not too much in case he appeared a caricature rather than dignified. The white silk scarf around his neck was barely visible when his jacket was fastened. A tall thin man of twenty-nine, he sniffed the worldliness of the air outside, mackintosh open and showing his smartest suit, a clean haversack settled on his shoulder. Fingers poking from the arm in its sling were available for adjusting his tie or dealing with trouser buttons. He took care not to look like one of the walking wounded back from a hard campaign of whippet breeding in the North.

The eternal pigeons circling Nelson's head spiralled down in clouds to scavenge crumbs and corn. One settled on the thatched napper of a five-year-old boy with sparkling blue eyes who held a piece of bread in a still hand hoping a bird would come off its perch and eat. Bert smiled when one did. On his way through the same square from school, so long ago, identical pigeons had brought him luck, reinforced him with their powers of intuition and self-preservation, and sent him on a circuit which had brought him back. He waved to the kid's young mother, and set off towards Covent Garden.

A streak of white shit struck the peak of his cap, from a Heinkel pigeon-bomber following along the street. He looked up at the plump-chested bird on the window sill turning its head this way and that, as if looking for another pigeon to blame it on. He slotted the map into his haversack and pressed the bell with the same force as starting a machine at work. Some Mrs Mop had not long scrubbed the step, but he scuffed his fag and leaned on the white button again. Maybe they were on holiday, though the date had been unmistakable. Or the letter had been posted from Mars and had been a hoax, in which case he would jump on the next train back. A busty woman in her twenties pulled the door open. ‘What do you want?'

‘I've got an appointment to see Mr Humphries.' He turned his scar away, and tried a half-cock grin to put her at ease.

‘Come in, then.' She showed him to a small office, treading backwards as if he might lunge forward for a kiss.

He wondered how long she had taken to nurture her posh accent from the glum corner of the country she had grown up in, and noted her diamond-shaped brass earrings, the string of black beads over her grey striped blouse, and a rosebud mouth with just the right curl for scaring callers away. Bert felt like belching in her face. ‘Worked here long?'

‘Longer than you.'

Sharpshit. He took his cap off. ‘It doesn't sound long to me,' Herbert said, in his most polished accent. ‘I'm rather surprised you can't be rather more polite to an author. If it weren't for someone like me you wouldn't have a job.'

‘Think I'd care? They pay me next to nothing.' She looked for something on the desk, which he thought might be a perfumed clothes peg to put on her snout, then fastened a few papers together. ‘What are you going to see Mr Humphries for?'

You may be Bert Gedling, he thought, but you don't have to think like Archie Bleasby. He went up close. ‘It's about a novel.'

‘And you have an appointment?'

‘I wouldn't be here if I didn't. Bert Gedling's the name.'

‘Oh.' She pressed a button on the intercom, and a Donald Duck squawk came back. ‘Sit down.' She pointed to a chair, as if he was blind. ‘He shouldn't be long.'

He preferred to stand, sniffing the dusty upholstery of the sofa while relishing a whiff of the girl's scent. To bolster the role of Bert Gedling, which he must put on in no uncertain terms, he recalled acting in the Ovid play at school. Now that he was on a real stage the experience would be put to more practical use, though the encounter with a publishing firm was a come-down compared to Phaeton's fatal drive across the universe in the Sun God's horse and cart. Life and death stakes weren't on the cards, but if this wasn't a metamorphosis he didn't know what was.

Perhaps the file box under Humphries' arm was to give the idea that he was hurried, the ruse wasted on Herbert, who saw him as ordinary enough in that he only had one side to his personality, and wouldn't be difficult to deal with. If he was a worried man he was the sort who had been born that way, and so was able to put on a smile of pretending to be at ease, betrayed by lines across his brow as close as contours defining a steep hill.

He looked at Bert from the doorway and, twiddling a watch chain across his waistcoat, came forward to shake his hand. ‘Humphries,' he said, unable to meet his eyes. He led the way to a large office on the first floor, the stair walls decorated with framed photographs of authors who looked as if they had been to the same school as Herbert Thurgarton-Strang.

They sat at opposite ends of a leather-covered couch. ‘Well, Mr Gedling,' Humphries said, still hugging the file box as if his lunch was in it. ‘I don't see any point in beating about the bush. We've read
Royal Ordnance
, and we're very impressed. We want to publish it.' He paused for a look of surprise, or even pleasure, but Herbert, knowing it was called for, and in spite of a bumping heart, gazed across at a shelf of novels, deciding it was unlikely that he had read books with such gaudy spines.

‘Mind you, it's an unusual piece of work, and there's no saying how well or otherwise it will sell, but we'll certainly do our best to push it. I don't think there has been a working-class novel quite like it, though I'm afraid you might have to alter a few of the more explicit words.'

‘Oh, well, 'appen I will,' he grudged. ‘People'll know what I mean, anyway.'

‘No doubt about that.'

Above the bookcase stood a large framed photograph of a school cricket team, and Bert walked across as if interested in the books. ‘You published all these?'

Humphries laughed. ‘Oh, many more than that.'

‘It's a lot.' He managed a look at the photograph and saw, among the lines of faces, his old adolescent self, not as he would like to have imagined – head half backwards, with a sneer at the world, or at least an aspect of Byronic contempt – but as a sixteen-year-old with a look of trepidation, he would almost say fear, certainly anxiety, unease, a nervousness at the lips and a stare showing how at bay and unhappy he must have been. To cover the shock and before turning round he took out a packet of Woodbines. ‘Fag?'

‘No, thank you. Are you all right?'

‘I was only thinking I ain't read any o' them books. I've got a lot to mek up for.' The cigarette hid his face in smoke. Isaac's advice had been to let them do most of the talking, but it was necessary to emphasize his identity as Bert Gedling, so he couldn't stay dumb.

‘I don't suppose you've had much time.'

‘True. I've slogged my guts out in a factory since I was fourteen, but at least I learned how to write a novel about that life.'

‘You certainly did. Do you still work there?'

Thoughts and talk lived on different levels, and he decided it was best not to speculate on how the photograph of the old cricket team came to be in Humphries' office. ‘I've got to earn a living, 'aven't I?' He looked around the room. ‘There are worse places.'

‘What about your family?'

Bert's impulse, which Herbert trod on, was to tell him that his family was none of his fucking business. Instead he decided he would be more convincing if he didn't clip off too many aitches. ‘Mam and Dad was killed in an air raid, so an aunt took me in. When she couldn't stand me going out to pubs and coming back kay-lied she threw me on the street and I 'ad to live in digs.'

A real son of the people. Amazing. Humphries shook the money up and down in his left trouser pocket. ‘How did you learn to write so well?' – not a grammatical slip anywhere, and the neatest-cleanest typescript I've seen for a long time. They'd even wondered whether it wasn't a novel cooked up by some university chap pulling a fast one, but it was far more authentic than that.

Bert smiled. ‘Easy. I read a lot o' books. Then again, I went to a good school till I was fourteen. If yer didn't spell right yer got bashed.'

Humphries stared, as if not entirely believing that he had before him an all-round twenty-two carat, totally unspoiled self-taught novelist from the working class. Bert gave the stare back, then crumbled his expression into the cheery open-hearted smile of a workman which, he knew from much practice with the mirror, would make him look like a berserker only halfway gone from self-control. Humphries cleared phlegm from his throat for a further question. ‘Where did you acquire that scar? And the sling? You seem to have been in the wars.'

Humphries felt free to ask about the scar because he looked on him as from a lower sort of life. He may not know why he's doing it, Herbert thought, but that's how it is. If he took me as one of his own kind he would have waited for me to tell him about it. The trouble is he doesn't even know he's being supercilious, and because I do, and because I want him to think I'm somebody I'm not, I won't give him a mouthful of well-delivered execration, but get back to being Bert.

‘I was. Life's a battlefield where I come from.' He lifted the sling an inch or two. ‘Industrial accident, this. As for the scar, they're a rough lot up north. I offended a bloke in a pub, but don't ask me what I said. Maybe I only just looked at him, and the ponce came for me with a knife. Got a swipe in before I could dodge. He thought he'd frightened me off, but nowt frightens me. I had my boots on, so I went straight back in and kicked the knife out of his hand. Then I cracked 'is ribs to stop his complaints. He didn't look very pretty after I'd done.'

He flipped his cigarette end into the empty fireplace, as if ready to go out and manufacture another fracas, or give a performance on the spot, should there be any sign of trouble.

Don't overdo the Bert bit. Pull back. Yet it was irresistible, because playing the role was as near as he'd get to driving a chariot across the sky – better in fact because he wasn't as daft as Phaeton, so it wouldn't be fatal. Functioning through the eyes, brain and heart of Bert made Herbert wonder how long he could keep up the stance, a long part to play, and not always easy, calling every moment for care and dexterity. It was hard to understand how Humphries was unable to penetrate such an everyday person and see the real man within. Had he led such a sheltered life? Still, didn't Archie always say that if you live a lie you become the lie itself, and didn't feel you were living a lie at all? He was acting out of inspiration, and knew it was safe to carry on. ‘I enjoy a bit of a bust-up on a Saturday night.'