The traffic was a bit hard and I used up some endurance just getting out of the car park. At the lights at the bottom of Fetter Lane I was behind an enormous tourist bus from Frankfurt. The guide spotted me and pointed me out to his passengers as a typical Fleet Street editor. They all seemed to be about sixteen. I tried to give them their money’s worth by looking energetic and ruthless, also thoroughly up-to-date in my approach. Or perhaps it was just the car. Talking of which, as I pulled away and again by the Law Courts the clutch was definitely on the heavy side, still, after everything I had done to it. I would have to get somebody in who knew a bit about the subject. Not my field, clutches. When it came to gearboxes, now, I reckoned I could hold my own, even with the paper’s motoring correspondent, not that that was saying much. In fact, a good half of my published works, articles as well as letters, had to do with gearboxes one way and another, trade press only of course. So far, at least. But if …
No, I must not let myself get out of thinking about what was on the way up. First, though, I was going to go back to that short phone conversation with Nowell. Had she really not named Steve, not laid it on the line that that was who she was talking about? Very likely. It was the sort of thing distracted females did in films — it just went to show how distracted they were. It was also the sort of thing some females did in real life distracted or not, and that went to show, really show, how wrapped up in themselves they were. In a small way. They knew who they were talking about and that was it. Not that they knew who they were talking about and you could bleeding well catch up as best you might — no, just they knew who they were talking about. Another time I might have pretended I thought she was talking about Prince Charles, but not today.
I had never felt I had had too much to do with either marrying Nowell or not being married to her. After going round with her for about six months I had suddenly noticed that I was already well on with a trip that ended in marriage and had no places to get off. Not that I had wanted to. Then after thirteen years and at no particular point that I could see she had gone and set up with this Bert Hutchinson. Between then and now I had done a great deal of thinking about him and how he compared with me, but it had not taken me all that long to decide that about the one difference between us there could be no argument about had to do with him being showbiz and me not being. In talking to people like Lindsey Lucas I would admittedly say that Nowell had gone off with Bert to be got better parts in television by him, but the fact that it had not happened told against that idea — she was too shrewd to be so wrong about what somebody could do for her. No, it was just that Bert fitted in with her by presumably liking to spend as much time as possible with showbiz people and I never had. I could stand spending quite a lot of time with them and looking after myself the rest of the time, only from Nowell’s point of view that was unsatisfactory in at least two ways. No prizes for seeing a connection here with her not having been able to run the whole of her and my life whereas perhaps Bert let her run the whole of theirs and even liked it, but that you obviously could argue about.
I had got to that point, and also to the Marylebone flyover, when it suddenly came to me that it was not trouble with or about Mandy or any other girl that was the cause of Steve’s behaviour. He had come in for that sort of trouble in the past and it had affected him differently, not in any kind of violent way, more prepared to hang on and keep quiet and tend to make the best of it. That went for how he had handled other kinds of upset. Whatever had happened to him was completely new.
The house was in Hamilton Terrace, stone and dark brick, hard to get into under a quarter of a million. In the garage at the side I noticed one of the first Jaguars, plate impressively DUW 1, well kept but not ridiculous. I pressed a button and heard a chime with a cracked note in it. The door was opened by a girl of seven or eight with straggling dark curly hair and a white dress down to the ground, like a kid in an old photograph. She also had a very boring face with no Nowell in it that I could make out.
‘I’ve come to see your mother,’ I said.
‘Who are you?’ Her voice reminded me of Mrs Shillibeer’s.
‘Well, I used to be married to her. She’s —’
‘Do you do commercials?’
‘No.’
Shoving past her was the thing, but she was holding the door only a little way open and standing in the gap, and I felt I could hardly trample her underfoot just yet. While I wondered about this I heard a lavatory-plug being pulled and an inner door opened, followed by a sharp thud like someone’s knee or head hitting the door, and after a moment the top half of Bert Hutchinson came in sight. I had forgotten — I had only seen him about once before — that he was one of the school that parted their hair just above the ear and trained it over the bald crown, a policy I thought myself was misguided, but only on the whole. Without noticing he pushed a colourful picture on the wall askew with his shoulder.
‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’ he asked me hoarsely and at the second attempt, and went on before I could answer, ‘Go on, get … get out of it, you …’
‘I talked to Nowell on the phone and she asked me to come round to give her a hand with Steve.’
‘That’s right, she did,’ he said, just as hoarsely. He could see straight away that this made a difference but was far from clear how much. Anyhow, he stayed where he was and so did the small girl, who had to be his daughter and did look rather like him in a frightening way.
‘Is he still here?’ I said to keep the conversation going.
‘Who? Oh … yeah … fuck …’ He looked me over, hesitated, then decided to stretch a point and pulled the door wide open. ‘You …’
‘Is that your Jaguar I see there?’
Nothing definite came of that. The hall was stacked with great bulging brown-paper parcels tied up with hairy string. Some of them had been partly torn open to show what looked like blankets and bolsters. It was rather dark and smelt of old flowers or the water they had been in. Not poverty-stricken, though.
I found Nowell in a lounge where there would have been plenty of room for a couple of dozen commercial travellers to hang about for the bar to open. All the pictures, including a large one let into the wall at the far end, were by the same artist or squad and showed one or more sailing-ships having a bad time. Nowell was sitting on a circular couch in the middle being talked to by a white-haired chap in a jacket put together out of suede, fisherman’s wool, rawhide and probably canvas. When she saw me she held up her hand with the palm outwards so as to get me to fight down my impatience till she had finished her listening. You could have told a hundred yards off that she was listening, hard enough, in fact, to make any normal person dry up completely in a few seconds. There was no sign of Steve, like pools of blood or blazing furniture.
It must have been a good three years since I had laid eyes on Nowell, either in the flesh or on the screen. She had not visibly aged, though her thick-and-thin look seemed to have become more noticeable. I had often tried to analyse it in the old days, but could still get no further than being nearly sure it consisted physically of a slight permanent rounding of the eyes and raising of the eyebrows plus the top teeth being a bit sticky-out in the English mode. In those old days it, the look, had been one of her great attractions as far as I was concerned, along with things like her breasts. I had not known then that the thick and thin in question was not what she would be at my side through but what she was prepared to battle through to get her own way. On the other hand there was nothing deceptive about her breasts, not then anyhow. Not much about them could be made out today through the top part of her faded dungarees. They and the polka-dotted handkerchief on her head gave the idea that she might be just going to get down to stripping the paint off a door or even hanging out the washing, whereas in fact she would have been easily as likely to be going up in a balloon. There was all that to be said and more, but sitting in the same room with her I found it impossible to be simply glad I was not married to her any more and not to fli
nch a bit at the thought. Stopping being married to someone is an incredibly violent thing to happen to you, not easy to take in completely, ever.
Funny old Nowell. Nowell? It was amazing, but in all those years I had never realized that of course that was wrong. Nowell was to do with Christmas — there was a carol about the first one. Noel was her name but she or her mother had just not been able to spell it. There were cases like Jaclyn and Margaux and Siouxie where no one seriously imagined that was right, but this was different. Nowell was like Jayne and Dianna and Anette where somebody had been plain bleeding ignorant.
I sat on and the bloke in the fancy jacket talked on. What he was saying must have been extremely important, because so far he had not had time to notice I had turned up. After a minute Bert came in carrying a glass with a blue-tinged liquid in it, perhaps drawn off from the insides of some appliance. I saw now that his glasses were similarly tinted. He looked over at me round their sides more than through them.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘have a … er … Do you want a drink?’
As a matter of fact I did, but I was not going to have one with him. ‘No thank you,’ I said.
He thought that could not be right and spoke more loudly. ‘I said do you want a drink.’ When I refused again he slumped down on a padded corner-seat some distance off. The little girl, who had followed him into the room, clambered up beside him in a complicated, drawn-out style and started leaning against him and rolling about all over him the way some of them do at that age with men in the family, not sexually quite because they leave your privates alone, but sexually all the same because you would have to take it like that from anyone else. In the meantime the kid watched me from under her eyebrows as though I had to be half out of my mind with jealousy.
After a bit of this I started to feel restless. I went over to Bert and said, ‘Where exactly is Steve, do you know?’
He lifted his arm up slowly to point at the ceiling. Nobody tried to stop me when I went out of the room. I reckoned to find Steve laid out in one of the bedrooms and walked up to the top floor, stopping on the way for a pee. The wc had a fluffy crimson mat round its base and another on its lid in case you wanted a comfortable sit-down. The place led off a bathroom with pine panels round the bath and one of Nowell’s classy loofahs, looped at the ends to help you do your back, on a bright brass hook behind the door.
Steve was in a bedroom that had large windows, no curtains, bare lemon-yellow walls and the late-afternoon sunshine streaming straight in, so it was never hard to see what was going on in the next few minutes. I thought of Susan’s description when I saw he was not only not asleep but not even in the sort of attitude sleeping people get into. Apart from the unmade bed he was lying on I noticed two rather neat piles of sheet-music and a newish bar-billiards table. That set me wondering, a third of a ton of slate and mahogany lifted all this way, and how, and why, but I soon dismissed it from my mind when I took another look at Steve.
‘What about getting on home?’ I said. ‘There’s nothing for us here.’
He muttered something I failed to catch, just a few words, rather fast.
‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘No, I was just …’ His voice petered out in a sort of quiet gabble.
I tried again. ‘Let’s be off. We could take in a beer at the Pheasant.’
‘Possessing all the relevant information to the most incredible degree,’ he said quickly.
‘What?’ I said, though I had heard well enough.
No reply. After a pause he suddenly swung his legs round and sat on the edge of the bed so as to face the main window. Then he raised one hand in what might have been a waving movement. Obviously there was nothing out there, but I went and looked to make sure and that was what there was, just a lot of roofs and down below not a soul in sight, a cat sitting on a wall and that was it. When I turned back to Steve I thought his face was not quite the same as what I was used to, not in any way I could have described but enough so that if I had seen him unexpectedly in the street I might not have recognized him for a second. Yes, it was something about the way his features related to each other. There was so much I wanted to ask him, no deep stuff, no more than what he had actually been doing before he turned up the previous night and what he had in mind to do, but there seemed to be no way to start. Another pause.
‘Let’s get going, shall we?’ I said, trying not to sound too jolly. ‘I’ve got the car outside.’
‘Do you believe in past lives?’ he asked me, in a rush as before.
‘Eh? I’m sorry, son, I just don’t understand what you mean.
‘You know, people living before and then being born again. Do you believe in it?’
‘Oh, reincarnation. No, I don’t think so. I haven’t really … How do you mean, anyway?’
‘People that lived a long time ago — right? — being born again now, in the twentieth century.’
‘But they …’ I stopped short — there was no sense in starting on what was wrong with that. ‘Say I do believe in it, what about it?’
Steve was staring out of or towards the window. The line of his mouth lengthened slowly in a thin, tight, horizontal grin, and he began to giggle through his closed lips in a half-suppressed kind of way, not a habit of his. Nothing much seemed to be happening to the rest of his face, except perhaps his eyes widened a bit. After a few moments he stopped, but started again almost straight away, this time putting his hand over his mouth. Even though it was not a specially disagreeable sound in itself I had soon had all I needed. I went brisk and businesslike, looked at my watch and turned to the door.
‘I must remember to get petrol,’ I said. ‘Would you keep a look out for a place on the way? I had a full tank on Tuesday, you know. It’s all the low-gear work in town.’
He nodded and got to his feet, but then he said, ‘Are they still there, those people downstairs?’
‘What? Well, they were when I came up. Why?’
‘What were they saying?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing of any consequence, I imagine. Mum was listening to that white-haired —’
‘What were they smirking and carrying on about?’
‘They weren’t carrying on about anything that I could see. They were just —’
‘Why are you pretending?’ He sounded no more than irritated.
‘Steve, I honestly —’
‘Don’t try and tell me you don’t know what I mean.’
I failed to come up with any answer to that one. For the first time I wondered what the horrible things had been that Nowell had told me over the phone he had said to her. She tended to have horrible things said to her more often than most people, though most people would probably not have counted a few of them. One lot had consisted of some stuff about his garden that a neighbour had said to her when he could have been saying how brilliant she had been as the publican’s wife in the film spin-off of that TV series. I remembered feeling quite indignant with him at the time.
Whatever Steve might have been saying earlier he seemed peaceable enough now, and when he and I went back to the lounge place we might have been any old visiting father and son looking in to say goodbye. Nowell and the white-haired fellow were not there, Bert and the child were, sprawled in front of the television set, or rather he was sprawled while she wriggled about next to him or on him. A cartoon was showing with the sound turned down so far that you got nothing more than the occasional faint clatter or scream. After a minute Nowell reappeared, having seen her chum off as I had sensed.
‘That was Chris Rabinowitz,’ she explained when we were still only halfway out of a pretty brief clinch of greeting. The name meant nothing to me, but the grovel in her voice made me think he must be on the production side rather than just another actor.
Steve seemed to take no notice and just said, rather flatly, ‘We’re off now, mum.’
‘Oh, are you, darling?’
There was a big hug then, with her very decently forgiving him for the horribl
e things. I looked at the television. The cartoon was the sort where as little as possible moved or changed from one frame to the next so as not to overwork the artists. Something went wrong with the hug but I missed what it was.
‘Cheers, Bert,’ said Steve, and started to move away.
‘You must come again soon,’ said Nowell to Steve and me, as though the present once-a-week arrangement was nowhere near good enough.
Immediately — though I soon saw there was no connection — Steve turned back to her and said in the same flat way, ‘Is he a Jew, that pal of yours?’
‘Who, Chris? I don’t know, darling. I suppose he is. Why, what of it?’
‘Do you get many of them coming round here?’
‘What, many Jews? Some, probably. But what on earth are you driving at?’
‘They’re moving in everywhere to their destined positions.’
‘Oh, come on, Steve, don’t be bleeding ridiculous,’ I said. ‘That’s not your style at all.’ It certainly was not, in fact he would sometimes call me a Nazi for making the kind of mildly anti-semitic remarks that came naturally to someone like me born where and when I was. ‘Or is it the way your pals are talking these days?’
‘You don’t understand. This isn’t that old-fashioned shit about Yids in the fucking golf club. None of you know what’s going on. They’re not ready, see, not even through the whole country yet, never mind some of the other places. But the map is there, and it projects, you know, if you can just get on to it. You want to get your head together.’ He seemed to think that this was an important secret and well worth knowing for its own sake too. ‘Take warning. When the pattern’s complete, the prediction of the ages will emerge. Surely you must have seen something, one of you. Doesn’t the colour of the sky look different after dark?’
This made Nowell quite cross. She tried a couple of times to interrupt and finally got in a burst. ‘For goodness’ sake shut up, darling. I can’t bear that sort of poppycock.’ That might well have been true — the sort of poppycock she could bear or better, like astrology and ESP and ghosts, was well worked over and properly laid out. ‘You’ve been reading one of these frightful mad paperbacks about cosmonauts or flying saucers or something.’