The Biographer’s Moustache Page 11

  The second thing, the one that failed to happen, started when he started to try to ring Joanna and went on with more of the same. The number was or seemed to be continuously engaged. There were various insignificant possibilities that would have explained this state of affairs, but he found it hard to shake off the suspicion that Joanna had decided he was not a good idea after all. The thought of this displeased him so much that he lost any capacity he might have had to estimate its likelihood. He punched the number for the sixth or seventh time. Engaged. What was he to do? If a grown-up man would have shrugged his shoulders and got on with some work, then that only went to show he was, as he had suspected before more than once, not a grown-up man. He crossed to the window. Last night’s rain had cleared up and there was pale but bright sunshine in which even the vile park looked all right. He had to go out.

  Not very long afterwards Gordon was in a bus, yet another bus as it appeared to him, consigning him to yet more of his life spent in surroundings he had not created nor even wished for and was permitted to leave only at certain predetermined points. One of these came up eventually and with some exertion he left the bus at a corner where he had alighted before, or so he soon discovered. Was he drunk? Not at this hour of the day, and probably not in any case. He was telling himself so and exciting some credence when he took in the fact that the tall elderly man in whose steps he had been treading for some while was in fact Jimmie Fane, returning home perhaps with a purchase of cat-food. At once all faith in the questions he had run up to justify his presence if needed, questions any old biographee would be dying to answer, entirely collapsed. He would ask Jimmie, ‘What decided you against becoming an academic?’ and Jimmie would reply, ‘I thought I told you not to start fucking my wife or [how had it gone?] trying to bring about such an association.’ If it came to fisticuffs …

  Gordon soon halted on the pavement, doing so in diminuendo style in case Jimmie, a bare twenty yards ahead and known to be short-sighted, should notice a sudden change of noise-level and swing belligerently round. Only a few yards off, Gordon saw a small side-turning, no more than an alley, and dodged into it. Then, this time telling himself from two incompatible points of view not to be a fool, he peered in the direction he had been going and saw Jimmie just started on a very life-like imitation of a man unself-consciously opening the front door of his house and presently shutting it after him. Finally, against the possibility that Jimmie might suddenly reappear in the street and look back the way he had come, Gordon hunched his shoulders and limped off round the corner.

  Once there he relaxed and tried moderately hard to remember what he had been intending to do if he had had untrammelled access to the Fane house. Abandoning this line of inquiry for lack of evidence, he found he was forced back on the one about what he was getting into, or thought he was getting into, a pair of questions or more likely a single one that seemed to become more and more rhetorical with every recurrence. No doubt, but there were good or at any rate strong reasons, to do with chivalry and lust, why he was buggered if he was going to bow out at this stage. By now he was on another bus still, which he got off again a short walk from the St James’s Library. Once there he telephoned the literary department of the Sunday paper he worked for, though it would have been fair to say he had not worked very hard for it lately. Desmond O’Leary was not in the office and nobody who was present seemed to have any clear idea of when and why he, Gordon, would be required to turn up there; still, it would look good to have telephoned. Most of the remaining hours of daylight he spent not quite profitlessly looking through the books on the open shelves of the library in search of reminiscential material relating to old Jimmie Fane. When evening had come he climbed on board an after all further bus and was carried like the wind, with none of the delays he might have been resigned to expecting, to a point where another short walk took him to the flat occupied by the Walkers. In fact he arrived at the building a few seconds before the agreed hour, just when a neurotically precise or something-like-that person would have got there. Nothing daunted, Gordon at once rang the bell and was admitted as before to the first-floor flat.

  Alec Walker was not to be seen, though it was clear very soon that his absence was due not to death or kidnapping but to more temporary displacement to the bedroom. Madge Walker was present, however. She had dropped her medieval-persuasion get-up in favour of a more orthodox jumper and dark skirt, though the orthodoxy was one of Gordon’s parents’ day or a couple of days before that. A polished-wood brooch in the form of a letter M was pinned below her shoulder and she had made her face up just a little, not enough to alarm him. Her manner was still friendly but no more assured than when he had first met her. He for his part tried to behave as if he dropped in on her at about this time two or three evenings a week, easing himself with a contented sigh into the chair he had sat in before.

  ‘I hope you like whisky,’ said Madge, producing an unopened half-bottle of Scotch.

  ‘Ah. Just a small one for me if I may. Lovely.’

  ‘Would you like some ice, Gordon? It’s no trouble, I’d have got some cubes out ready, only I didn’t want them to start melting.’

  ‘No really, I prefer it without. With just a little of that water. That’s fine, marvellous. Aren’t you going to have one?’

  ‘Later on I might. Cheerio.’

  ‘Cheerio.’

  It was at this early stage that Gordon started thoroughly disbelieving Jimmie’s account of Madge Walker as a dangerous and-or dreadful woman at the centre of a web of deception and lies. Nor did he set about changing his mind back again at any point in what she went on to tell him about Alec and their life together past and present. When the talk shifted to Jimmie, Gordon put himself on alert.

  ‘Yes, I must have asked him three or four times what he was doing in the war,’ said Madge, ‘but he wouldn’t give me so much as a hint. Just said he was working for the government, well that was no help at all, everybody was working for the government in those days. He didn’t like being asked about it and once he got quite cross and made me promise not to ask him again.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘No, I’d promised. That’s not to say I wasn’t strongly tempted from time to time or stopped wondering.’

  This exchange had the effect of reminding Gordon that not so long ago he had sort of promised Jimmie not to see Madge again. Certainly he had sworn that there was nothing she could say or do that would have led him to go near her in the future, but he was in the clear there, having himself initiated their present meeting. In the clear technically, maybe. There was also the consideration that to imply so strongly that promises were unbreakable, even ones made to Jimmie, was no doubt the sort of thing said by women at the centre of webs of this or that. But Gordon could not see that either of these points counted for much compared with his recent feeling that Madge’s version of events was to be trusted.

  ‘How did you first meet Jimmie? – but before you answer, do you mind if I use this contraption?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a tape-recorder. I’ve got a good memory but without this I’d have to keep writing things down and stopping and starting.’

  ‘I see. At least I think I do. Nobody will be able to hear what it says, will they? Hear what I say, I mean.’

  ‘Not without your specific written permission.’

  ‘That’s a relief. I can see I’ll have to trust you, Gordon, but I’m sure I can do that. Very well. I’d better come closer, hadn’t I?’

  ‘No need, it can hear you from where you are. Right, tape running.’

  It emerged that, their fathers having been at school together, Madge had first met Jimmie before the war, when both were in their teens, but they were never close friends, let alone anything more, until 1943. By that time she was married to her first husband, a well-to-do young Peruvian who had volunteered for the RAF.

  ‘Yes, he was really quite well off,’ said Madge, ‘and quite charming, good at parties and so forth, and he
danced like a dream, but he was a horrid little man really. They have llamas in Peru, you know, and I used to wonder whether that had any sort of bearing on what he wanted to do to me, or rather me to do to him. But I didn’t have to hang about wondering for very long because I ran into Jimmie again, and I lost no time in scampering off with him and ditching nasty little Flight Lieutenant Padilla. I can’t tell you how wonderful Jimmie was in those days, I couldn’t understand why every girl who met him didn’t fall head over heels in love with him. Just the way he talked …’

  One subject he evidently disliked talking about, in addition to what he was doing in the war, was marriage. Jimmie’s taciturnity on the matter was neither here nor there for quite a while, because the only marriage of any concern was Madge’s to Padilla. When this eventually ceased, however, after a rather long interval by present-day standards, the question of marriage between Jimmie and Madge seemed to become more immediate. At least it had to her.

  ‘I can only tell you what happened,’ said Madge to Gordon. The chap I really got on with like a house on fire was Flight Lieutenant Paso-Doble’s papa. He was a proper South American hidalgo of the old school, such an old school that I rather suspected him of having wanted to run off with me himself, though of course he was far too much of a gent to put any such thought into words. But what he did do was insist that the Flight Lcot should go on paying his wife, i.e. me, the same very decent allowance as before while the marriage technically lasted. A matter of family honour, you know. But the instant marriage ended so did allowance, like that, in fact wham!’

  ‘Which presumably had some effect on your relationship with Jimmie,’ said Gordon.

  ‘And how!’

  It was really not very funny to hear how Jimmie had quite suddenly become remote, uncommunicative, with intervals of exaggerated warmth and intimacy, and not funny at all to be told about their final parting. The fact of its taking place had been no great surprise to Madge, though, as she pointed out now, even fully expected nasty things lose none of their nastiness for that. And what she had not expected by a long chalk was Jimmie’s method of intimating to her that their romance was at an end.

  ‘We’d arranged to meet for a cocktail in the bar at the Tripoli,’ said Madge. ‘it wasn’t as madly expensive then as I gather it is these days, but it still wasn’t cheap. I remember I got there a few minutes early, so I ordered a drink, a White Lady it was, and settled down to wait for Jimmie, he was never one for turning up on the dot. Look, I hope you don’t mind, Gordon dear, but before I go on I think I’ll just go and see if the captain wants anything. I usually pop in on him about this time. The nice man who lives upstairs fixed up what he called an intercom between the bedroom and here, but Alec would never teach himself to use it. I shan’t be very long. Help yourself to some more whisky.’

  She went out. Gordon switched off his recorder, left the bottle as it was and heard Madge’s voice and Alec’s from where the bedroom presumably was. The serenity with which she had told her tale so far had been total, never deviating into forced vivacity or any other kind and seeming likely to remain. Well, the events happened fifty years before.

  ‘All squared away,’ she said when she came back. ‘You have to hand it to the captain, never a word of complaint. Now where had I got to?’

  ‘You’d just ordered a White Lady in the bar at the Tripoli,’ said Gordon, switching his recorder on again.

  Madge gave it an unfriendly glance. ‘Have we got to have that thing on?’

  ‘It saves trouble, that’s all.’

  ‘Would you mind very much if we didn’t have it on for the next bit?’

  ‘If you’d rather.’ He pressed the On-Off button to signify Off.

  ‘I expect you’re thinking I’m just a silly old woman but I can’t help feeling it’s like another person listening to what I say. It’s ridiculous, I know.’

  ‘No, I understand. Please carry on when you’re ready.’

  ‘Thank you, dear Gordon. Well, you’ll have guessed that Jimmie didn’t turn up that time. I tumbled to it fairly soonish, I suppose, what with one thing and another, though I’d embarked on another White Lady by that time. I felt a bit of a fool quite frankly, sitting there exactly like somebody who’d been stood up, either that or a cruising tart who hadn’t clicked. Anyway it wasn’t as bad as it might have been, because I had just enough money on me to pay for the drinks and get myself home. I made myself some scrambled eggs on toast and listened to some awful clever play on the wireless where everybody in it was meant to be dead and then I went to bed and slept not too badly at all. You see it wasn’t the first time he hadn’t turned up like that. But then he didn’t telephone first thing in the morning to apologize and sort of explain and suggest another date.

  ‘Then when after a couple of days I’d still heard nothing somebody rang me up and told me Jimmie’d been dining at the Ritz that very same night, we worked it out, and what he’d been at was a kind of unofficial engagement party where the centre of attraction was him, naturally, and a lady called Betty Brown, the daughter of that newspaper-owner chap, who was giving the party. I didn’t see Jimmie after that for years, not till about 1950 or even later. The former Miss Brown had left him by then and I was having a lovely time with another gentleman, so you see the world had moved on quite a way since the evening Jimmie and I were supposed to meet in the bar at the Tripoli.’

  ‘Did he ever say why he hadn’t let you know beforehand, I mean try and apologize or say he was sorry or anything like that? I mean …’

  ‘It’s all right darling, it was all those years ago and I must have told you I’m still very fond of him. Well, I suppose it might be more accurate to say I’ve been very fond of him for a very long time, because I certainly wasn’t very fond of him when I understood what had happened or when he rang me up for a chat and for a few months afterwards. Yes, he rang me up eight days from the evening he’d handed me the frozen mitt, which also happened to be the day his engagement had been announced in The Times – he’d considerately given me time to get over any feelings of surprise or disappointment I might have had. He explained in that special high I-will-not-be-interrupted voice of his that he’d deliberately chosen a sudden and, what word did he use, emphatic, an emphatic method of breaking it off, or letting me know it was broken off, the idea behind that having been to impress on me, to leave me in no doubt whatever that we had parted for good.’

  ‘And breaking your date and keeping you in suspense for a bit had all helped.’

  ‘Some of that might have seemed remiss of him, but really it was hardly to be expected in the nature of things that it would take so long before some third party came along and, er, filled me in.’

  At no point in her recital had Madge’s tone deviated from what might have been expected of an interested and reasonably neutral friend of the participants, however clear it might have been that her sympathies on the whole lay with one side rather than the other. Gordon waited to see if there was anything more to come. When nothing did he asked Madge about the last time she had seen Jimmie.

  ‘It must be five or six years since he came to this very flat, I thought about it a lot but I’ve never been able to decide what he came for.’

  ‘But it was after the captain …’

  ‘Became more or less as he is now. Oh yes. Why?’

  ‘I just thought Jimmie might have weighed in, or offered to.’

  ‘Weighed in? You mean stumped up, do you? Financially?’

  Gordon nodded his head in some embarrassment. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to poke my nose into any of your –’

  ‘You’re not, I promise you, and anything you say won’t go any further. It’s kind of you to think about us like that but really and truly there’s no need to. Alec and I have both got a bit of money, not very much but then we don’t need much. I saw you looking at that whisky-bottle and perhaps you were saying to yourself a half’s all they can afford, but no, it’s more a whole one would have been an extravagance, and we certa
inly can’t afford to go in for any of that.’

  ‘What about your Yorkshireman? That sort of fellow doesn’t come cheap.’

  ‘Young Coop, he’s called Cooper actually, he’s honestly quite reasonable, and he does more than he has to now and then and nothing’s too much trouble, he’s here every morning at ten on the dot and it’s just let me know if there’s anything special for me today Mrs Walker, I can’t do the accent. I’ve got very fond of young Coop. He’s taken away a lot of my worry about going before Alec does.’

  A moment later Gordon said, ‘We’ve come quite a long way from Jimmie.’

  ‘Haven’t we just, and perhaps you’ve been thinking after some of the things I’ve told you I might be too proud to touch a penny of Jimmie’s money, and perhaps I ought to be but I’m afraid I’m not. So for the sake of my immortal soul it may be just as well the situation is shall we say unlikely to arise.’

  After another pause Gordon said, ‘Could I have a spot more whisky?’

  ‘Sure thing, baby. A small one with a dash of water. I don’t see why I shouldn’t join you for once in a blue moon.’

  ‘You do that small thing.’

  ‘You betcha sweet life. Here’s how!’

  He could not quite bring himself to say anything back, but gave a great cheek-involving wink as he raised his glass.