The Broken Chariot (38 page)

He sliced brown bread and opened a tin of sardines into a saucer: the survival of the fittest had to begin with yourself. A barb on the ragged edge of the tin drew copious blood, an encouraging sign. Maybe his despair had been brought on because nothing had gone into his stomach since a meagre breakfast of distant coffee and a slice of buttered bread. He had been too intent on opening letters from the mat downstairs to eat much. Those with typed addresses were seen to first, in case there were cheques inside. The second half of his advance came for the novel, and a few hundred for a paperback, as well as cash for an American edition, an unnerving cocked hat for one post. He unfolded and flattened them with his buttery knife: let the teller at the bank wonder what the stains were.

The top came easily off a bottle of White Horse and, filling a cup halfway, alcohol felt good at the lips, put pepper in his belly, to be mopped up by a sandwich. As if the blood was ink he pressed several folds of blotting paper over it till the skin was dry, and whisky could be rubbed into the cut.

Behind the window of a showroom in South Kensington he saw an Austin Healey Four Cylinder One Hundred Sports Car, on sale for five hundred pounds, a heartening object to spring into your sight on a Monday morning. He sloped back and forth along the low slung brutish panels, fingered the dark green wings as smooth as marble. ‘I'm serious. It's a beauty.'

‘Then sit in it, pal.' The salesman was a tall Germanic-looking man with rimless glasses and an amiable worldly squint. ‘The boss isn't in yet. Cup of coffee while you wait?'

‘That's very good of you. Yes, please.'

‘No trouble.'

Herbert stroked the pristine wheel, and felt his prospects good enough to stick up two fingers at the notion of getting a job. Solvent for at least a year, it would seem like twenty at the rate time had gone in the last two decades. He called the man over. ‘Don't care if I do go broke. I'll have it.'

The boss came in, overcoat, scarf and homburg, despite the warmish day, looking like a brother (or cousin) of Glenny the rackrent landlord, whose offer of a job Herbert had turned down. ‘I'll have it, if I can drive it away.'

‘How would you like to pay, sir?'

All problems solved, he drove on to the road. After the car had soaked its gallons out of a pump near Shepherds Bush, he took the paces slowly around quiet streets so that he could gauge the dimensions. Drops of rain splattered the windscreen, wipers leaving a clean Perspex after every heartfelt sweep. In the coffee bar his position by the window kept the car in view long enough for him to know it was his.

He rocketed from the starter's line at the Notting Hill Gate traffic lights, well in advance of any slow coach or happy saver, cruised along the Bayswater Road, and threaded a way through Mayfair and Soho, feeling like a kid who had been given a sparkling mechanical toy for his birthday.

Pulling up at a phone box he called Deborah. Could they meet after work? ‘I'll take you to dinner.'

‘Yes, please. Can't wait. I know a terrific place in Hampstead.' She wondered, putting the receiver down, if he hadn't been a hoaxer, not Bert Gedling at all, unless he was trying to bring his accent into line, which would be no bad thing.

At his solitary tea in the thirties splendour of the Hyde Park Hotel he imagined her thoughts, and smiled at their progress. She would analyse every nuance, and sooner or later get close to the right answer. Looking into the Bible he learned that Deborah was a prophetess, reason enough for falling in love.

The waitress brought extra butter and filled his pot with hot water whenever he called. She had a stout figure and dark straight hair, and Herbert, because of her accent, wanted to know where she came from. She told him she'd been a teacher in Australia, and was working her way around Europe. Feeling quixotic, he left a pound note for a tip.

Deborah, walking down the steps of the offices, heard him pip the horn from across the street, and paused at the kerb for traffic to pass. Herbert seemed to get his first real look at her face, her features usually too volatile to picture her properly when among other people.

As for what she was like inside – inside? Where the fuck was that? – whoever you looked at, and thought you had weighed up, and knew from the spleen outwards, could remain a mystery, and the weighing up had to begin all over again. No one realized that better than he, and you could but speculate: often wide of the truth, yet sometimes close to reality. People, like quicksilver, needed a lifetime to properly pin down, the only thing being that you couldn't afford to wait that long, and so used the imagination to fix them for better or worse at a particular moment and say that's how they were.

She was a little above middle height, and walked across the road in such a way as to show she had been carefully brought up but had enough independence to go her own way. Her nose pointed somewhat in the air, as if she considered everyone else as shit, which amused him, though he liked how her white and even teeth showed he deserved a smile. Either she was more beautiful than he had supposed, or it was marvellous what a sports car did for you.

He looked in no way, she thought, like the proletarian novelist he was said to be, when leaning over the wheel to unlatch the door, though on opening his mouth he couldn't help betraying himself. ‘Come on in, duck, and I'll tek yer for a ride in this mechanical pram.'

His accent was bound to mellow after a while, unless he's playing it up because he hopes I find it sexy, which in a way I do. The interesting scar – a mark of Cain if ever there was one – hinted at a fair amount of trouble in his life, never mind how he said he'd come by it, though without it he might look a bit more ordinary.

She thought him handsome, but unpredictable and hard to know, perhaps a man to beware of. Her father had warned her of people ‘from further down the ladder', who tried to pass themselves off for what they hadn't a snowball's chance in hell of becoming. Otherwise the kindest and gentlest person, he said he couldn't bear social climbers. ‘They're only out for themselves, so avoid them like the plague. You know what they say? “Put a beggar on horseback, and he'll ride roughshod over you.”'

He was only trying to protect her, bless him, but she was quite good at looking after herself, thank you very much. Bert Gedling wasn't climbing anywhere, though he sometimes gave the impression of treading in hobnailed boots across the whole spectrum. Luckily he wasn't fat, or coarse, or bumptious, or anything like such a person might be as shown on television. Nor was he paranoid or set on murder. His nails were scrubbed, and hair smartly cut, shoes polished and cravat arranged into the neck of his shirt. He used deodorant, so didn't smell, and even if it was his only suit he knew how to use a clothes brush. Perhaps he came from a more respectable level of the working class than he let on or, going by his rough-beast streak, he was the black sheep who even so hadn't been able to throw off the cleanly habits of his family.

It didn't much matter that she would never be able to introduce him to her father, as he wove with aggressive skill through traffic up Charing Cross Road. She caught looks of curiosity and admiration from other motorists, and glares of vile envy from one or two pedestrians. Her father would probably have been among the latter, but she didn't care what he would think of Bert, and would do as she liked, which was what living in London was all about.

My lovely popsy girl, he laughed, shooting the amber towards Camden Town, is enjoying her spin with Champagne Bertie, and I'm wallowing in being with her. Like an air stewardess in the telly ad she lit a pair of cigarettes and put one between his lips. Life was on the mend, though he supposed Archie in his place would have preferred her to be married, peril being pornography to him. Herbert took a hand away to up the gear. ‘You are the most beautiful girl I've ever met, seen, or even dreamed about, and I love you. I know you don't believe me, but I can't help that.'

He was lying, of course. The first words of any man who wanted to be intimate with you was to say he loved you. And the first move of a woman who wanted the man to make love to her was to light a cigarette and put it between his lips. Her laugh at his declaration carried them much of the way up Haverstock Hill.

She lived on the third floor of a large old house, which allowed him to park his precious motor off the road – and close the top to stop pigeons making a mess of the upholstery. There were trees along the drive, but the garden had degenerated into a jungle.

‘That's my Mini over there,' she nodded. ‘I don't drive it to work, though it's good to rattle around in at weekends, or go to see my parents in Woking now and again.'

A curvaceous bottle of old Cliquot was lifted from behind the seat of his Healey. ‘Smart little buggy, the Mini. Do you have a room, or a flat?' Meaning that if she's sharing maybe I'll have a go at the other girl as well.

She drew him into the hall. ‘A flat, and I don't have to share.' Rising damp, woodworm and deathwatch beetle, with a dash of Colorado thrown in, it stank like his old school, tingled at the nostrils as they went up creaking stairs. She leaned on the banister. ‘Daddy bought me a ten-year lease.'

He wondered if the building would last that long. ‘What does he do, your old man?'

‘He was a barrister, but retired early.'

How a barrister's daughter levelled with the son of a brigadier general he neither knew nor cared, all such stuff left behind decades ago, at least on his part. Maybe everyone would start to think the same, though he doubted that anything could fundamentally change in such a country. Even if her father was a docker he wouldn't have minded.

He followed her into a large sitting room, with bedroom, kitchen-diner, and bathroom attached. ‘Quite a nice pied-à-terre, duck.'

‘It used to belong to Dominic, till he got a place in Chelsea.'

‘That fat worm.'

‘He's a good editor. And it was kind of him to tell me the flat would be falling vacant. I'd always wanted to live in Hampstead, instead of the bedsit in Fulham. Oh, by the way' – she took a letter from her handbag – ‘Dominic asked me to give you this. It came via the office.'

Postmarked Nottingham, he was glad to note, for it might help to establish his authenticity in Dominic's oyster eyes. He put it into his pocket, and looked around the room. She certainly did live here, everything neat and shipshape. ‘A very cushy billet.' He took off his jacket only after she had shed her coat. ‘Where are the napkins?'

‘In the kitchen drawer. Glasses top left in the cupboard.' Like all the men she had been used to he was curt, but basically courteous, so why should she think him any better or worse? He came in with two glasses: the cork hit the ceiling. ‘After we've polished this off we can go out to eat. I'm clambed to death.'

She would have preferred dry sherry, but maybe he had seen an old Charles Boyer film. ‘I'm fairly hungry, as well.'

He stood by the bay window looking into the half-leaved branches, mouth down and brown eyes sharp but, she thought, seeing only himself, different now to the mad but gallant boyo who had driven her from the office. His saturnine aspect showed character, too broody perhaps at times, as if he was having a struggle coming to terms with himself – with his so-called success, probably – since whether he admitted it or not, it must be something of a shock, though so far she had to admit he was carrying it off with panache, unless he was a consummate actor.

Everything about him puzzled her, even so, because she had seen no supposed workman on the street with anything like the quality of his looks at certain moments. Perhaps experience in the matter was lacking, not having been further north than Whipsnade Zoo, and then only for a few hours, and gazing at faces not at all likely to help her speculations. It could be that there were many specimens like himself in the great unknown North, and that if she were to see him in overalls and cloth cap, with a spanner in one hand and a hammer in the other, and a cigarette between his lips as he puzzled out some difficult job or other, she would have no trouble in identifying him as a run-of-the-mill workman.

Another explanation – though this was really fanciful, as if out of a Victorian novel – was that he had been snatched from his cradle by some villainous woman who had, for the price of a bottle of beer, palmed him off to a family as low down in the social scale as his had been above it. Anyhow, what had changed him from one person to the other she couldn't know about, but she was more than half in love with the result, and felt like getting into bed with him this minute, whether or not it was because of the champagne, but didn't want him to think her cheap or easy to get in case he lost all respect for her, as her mother had said men would if she let them get that far, and in fact as one or two had already done.

He swung away, and set down his empty glass, deciding it wasn't the time to tell her who he was. It was necessary to avoid possible recrimination, or at best a long explanation as to why he'd got into the Bert guise at all, if he wasn't to forfeit his chance of seducing her. A confession had been urgent from the beginning, and though there would never be an ideal moment, it would certainly be stupid to make one now.

So after rehearsing the suitably crass lingo of his next announcement, he said: ‘Come on, love, let's finish this bottle of bubbly, then we can go out and find one o' them posh troughs to scoff at. Maybe they'll light us a couple of orange candles, and somebody'll scrape out a tune on a fiddle when we spoon into each other's eyes.'

She broke away from his kisses and sat on the bed. ‘Are you absolutely sure?'

What a question! – needing only a look for an answer.

Knowing there to be no option because of the way she felt, she began to undo her blouse, her eyes willing him to undress as well, though he wanted no telling.