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  I waited.

  “Last night,” he said. “You never been there before. What I mean is, not since a couple of months since I joined the firm.”

  I waited some more.

  “And Mrs. Fowler. I know how you and her, you know, sort of come to joint decisions, in many things.”

  I smiled.

  “No need to worry about that, Mickey,” I said to him. “You should know by now, anything like that, it’s just not on, is it? I mean, you’re a major shareholder. That, if nothing else, proves my confidence in you.”

  Mickey sniffed.

  “Well, I shouldn’t have mentioned it, really,” he said.

  “Well, there was no need to.”

  “No.”

  Mickey sniffed again, then stood up.

  “Anyway,” he said. “I’m on my way over to see Maurice Ford. Just a check. Anything you want me to say to him?”

  “Not that I can think of. Of course, any unforeseen eventualities, it’s up to you what you say to him.”

  “Right,” said Mickey. “I’ll be off then.”

  He tapped the edge of the table once with his knuckles, then walked around the sunken area and opened the doors and closed them behind him.

  I looked at the newspaper in front of me. The photographs showed Stan Bowles thrusting his fist up into the air as he turned away from the goal seconds after he’d scored the clincher.

  A very clever fellow, Mickey was.

  THE SEA

  THE TANK ISN’T GETTING any closer.

  I didn’t go to the funeral. As I said to her later, it would have seemed like an intrusion into her private grief.

  Afterwards, of course, she’d had to admit, those months between his return and his final farewell, so to speak, those months had been a strain. It hadn’t been the same, whatever she’d told herself. Oddly, she said, a lot of the strain came from him, trying to show her how sincere he was in his declarations. She should have realised, of course, why he’d tried to impress her. Ironic, she said. She wouldn’t have found out if it hadn’t been for the crash. Who the girl was, the police had never been able to discover. Both bodies had been burnt beyond recognition, but you would have thought someone would have come forward, somewhere, to report a girl of her age gone missing. She hadn’t been from his head office, or from any of the branches. She could have been from one of the firms he called at, but, as Jean said, if she had been, someone would have connected the two of them some time. The only evidence of her existence, apart from her remains, came from the publican who ran the pub near his head office, where he often used to drop in for a drink. All the publican could say was that on that particular night, the night of the crash, Jean’s husband had been having a quiet drink at the bar when this girl had come in, on her own … nothing unusual in that these days. The two of them had got talking. Nothing unusual in that, either. The publican did hear something, when they left, about could he drop her anywhere? Jean had been particularly cynical about that bit: he’d been so careful, even in a place they never went together.

  Nobody could really explain the accident. Well, a dozen witnesses, they see a dozen different things; some of them said the car behaved as though a tire had blown, which was impossible to check, the state the motor was in; but they all agreed he must have been doing seventy-plus when he crossed the central reservation. Amazing how, in the resulting pile-up, he’d only taken another two with him, along with the girl.

  Regarding that, Jean had been particularly bitter; the other innocent deaths, as much as anything, contributed to his memory becoming more to her than just the literal ashes he had become already.

  I’d told her, look, you mustn’t dwell on things like that. An accident’s an accident. They happen every day.

  THE SMOKE

  AFTER MICKEY’D GONE, I went through into the office.

  Jean was leaning back in the chair behind her desk. Some of the books lay open in front of her. The grey Soho daylight diffused her thoughtfulness. My entrance did nothing to break her present preoccupation.

  I sat down by the window.

  “You haven’t had your coffee yet,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “You want me to give Gerry a buzz?”

  She shook her head again.

  “The mail order,” she said.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, at present, there are eighty-four agents.”

  Which was right: throughout the country, there were these offices, at present numbering eighty-four, run by an agent each with a phone and a typewriter and an addressing machine and nothing else but wall-to-wall brown envelopes. And of course, the merchandise, that being the Blues. This side of the business, being of its particular nature, meant a lot of changing of offices, even with what we paid the law, but apart from that, the overheads were very low. You won’t believe how much that side of the business takes. It takes over £1,200,000 a year. I told you you wouldn’t believe me. Nobody does, not even the agents, who have no idea how many other agents there are. Except for the law, of course, who in a way are like an extra agent with their ten percent. They know. That’s why they ask for so much. If you still don’t believe it, look at it this way: each agent has a list of around one thousand clients. They renew a movie once a month, sometimes more than one movie, at our competitive part-exchange rates of £10 a go. The agents do this renewal for them automatically. You can work out your own arithmetic.

  This was just one of our businesses.

  What Jean did was to check the books. There were other employees who did them, but Jean checked them. She was good at it. The only other area of the business over which she was in direct control was quality control of the girls, and not the ones you can get for a hundred quid a go. She looked after the expensive ones.

  Other business matters were attended to by Mickey and myself.

  I lit a cigarette and nodded in assent to the number of offices we had.

  “Yes,” she said, because it hadn’t been a question.

  I waited.

  “And none of them have closed recently,” she said.

  Another non-question. I waited again.

  “In that case I can’t make a great deal of sense out of these figures,” she said. “Of course, they add up. But compared to the figures for the previous three-month period, they don’t.”

  “McDermott told me he’d had to do a bit of juggling in the Coventry area; we had to set up a couple of new addresses.”

  “I’m not talking about that kind of thing. Come and look at this.”

  I got up and stood next to her and leant over the desk. Jean pushed two books side by side. I looked at one set of figures, and then at the other. Then I looked at them again.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You see what I mean,” she said.

  THE SEA

  I CLIMB THE TANK and sit on top of the turret which has been fused forever to the rest of the metal by the pounding of the rockets. The surrounding flatness causes my present position to seem doubly elevated and the sea takes on a greater illusion of depth.

  I light a cigarette and then I withdraw the hip flask from the pocket of my anorak, take a long pull, and wait till it hits. Then I take another drink and set the flask down on the rim of the turret. The blackened cannon points out to sea in metallic parody of Millais’s The Boyhood of Raleigh.

  Of course, in many ways, Jean would have been an ideal choice to look after the business, if I’d been looking for a partner and not only a wife. As I’d been looking for neither, her business sense had been an additional bonus. But I could never have considered her as either until I’d discovered what her reaction was to the real nature of myself and of my occupations.

  For a long time, I held off. A long long time. Even in the normal way of things, I stayed away from her for six weeks after the tragedy.

  And after that, when things had taken the course I’d known they would, it had been a very gradual process; after all, before the snowball co
uld begin to gain momentum, I had to find out as much about her as she was going to know about me.

  But I’d never expected her to assume the mantle I’d gradually extended to her in quite the way that she did. People are a constant surprise; everything conceivable is in them, but very few people know of the possibilities beneath the surface they assume to be themselves, even fewer have the courage to dismiss their former selves as a mere cocoon. Later in our married life, she’d told me that there had come a point at which anything I’d casually hinted at had not only been expected but eagerly looked forward to. And when the barricades were finally down, each new aspect of the view into my world opened up new insights into herself, her reactions tipping and tilting horizons never even considered before. She was like an instant alcoholic with a life pass to a distillery. Literally, after her husband’s death, she became a new woman.

  THE SMOKE

  “IT LOOKS LIKE A case of overconfidence,” said Jean.

  I stood by the window and lit another cigarette.

  “I’m going to have to go right back,” she said, looking at the books. “This didn’t start yesterday.”

  I didn’t answer. If there was anything I hated, it was something like this. You paid them more than they could ever hope for, and it still wasn’t enough.

  “How long will it take?”

  “God knows,” she said.

  “There’s no point in saying anything to Mickey yet.”

  “No.”

  Through the window I watched a jet as it dawdled across the sky.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I’m going over to the Steering Wheel.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “I think it’s a very good idea.”

  I went out of the office, poured myself a drink, carried it through to my dressing room and began to change into one of the suits that had just been sent over from Rome. While I was doing that Jean came into the room and in the mirrored walls I watched from about forty-eight different angles as she took off her slacks and sweater. Then I watched her progress as she walked over to me and leant against me and put her arms round my waist and dug her fingernails into my stomach. When she spoke it was no longer in the businesslike tone she’d used in the office.

  “What happened to Arthur?” she said.

  I turned to face her. Now her hands slid up to my shoulderblades and the nails dug in again as her hands trailed slowly back down my spine.

  “Mickey’s seen to him.”

  The nails dug deeper and she pressed herself even closer. Her eyes were intense but at the same time her eyelids drooped, hooded like a goshawk’s. I knew what she wanted to say to me, what she wanted to express, but to put it into words would be to reveal her feelings too nakedly. I knew the feeling well; it’s like when you have your finger on the trigger and as you breathe in to squeeze, you hold the breath as if to freeze the second before firing, before the final act of commitment. But, in any case, I knew exactly how she felt; her body was telling me, and my own body was recognising the signals with ease, because it was reacting in exactly the same way. The Steering Wheel could wait.

  THE SEA

  I DROP MY CIGARETTE into the well of the turret and take another pull at the flask. I look at my watch. It’s a quarter past eight. By the time I walk back to the bungalow and drive the Marina into Mablethorpe the parts of the town that are open out of season will be open. I have a final pull at the flask, put it back in my pocket, jump down from the tank and begin to add another line of footprints in the sand to keep the others company.

  As I walk I light another cigarette and the image of Mickey Brice comes into my mind, not as I saw him the second before he died, but at Ling House, Courtenay’s place, a few miles out of Newmarket. It wasn’t only the races we’d gone there for.

  As long as someone like myself is successful and safe enough to be respectable, like a firm star or a singer or a footballer, there will always be people like Courtenay. He liked to associate with people at the height of their particular profession. Not having a profession himself, just a title and a few thousand acres and houses in and out of London and a fortune he needed help in spending, Courtenay liked collections of those who’d had to work for their glittering prizes under his various roofs. Of course, he chose his house guests very carefully. Even with all his money, he felt the indiscreet could lead to costs far beyond mere financial ones.

  Even so the entertainments Courtenay provided for his guests had gained a guarded reputation among the select; to be invited to a Courtenay weekend was both an honour and a challenge to the sexuality of the people behind the personalities.

  Myself, I didn’t go all that often. It was coals to Newcastle. Mickey was quite a regular visitor, though. He and Courtenay got on extremely well, being the way they were. I didn’t mind. Whatever Mickey did in his own time was his own business.

  When I got the invitation for this particular weekend, I accepted. I’d known Jean for just over a year. It had seemed a suitable occasion to demonstrate that what was indulged in by people in private was not unique, and was often publicly demonstrated in the best of circles. And as Mickey was going as well, his presence and participation would perhaps ease her from one concept to another.

  This particular weekend, Courtenay had a large square of coconut matting on the floor of what he smilingly referred to as his Games Room. Silk cushions big enough to accommodate three or four people at a time had been placed around the matting, providing another distinctly more comfortable square. Around eleven in the evening, everyone combined as an audience on the cushions. Courtenay’s bearers kept everyone supplied with what they were drinking or whatever else they were on. From the official guest list, only Mickey was absent from the cushioned audience, albeit temporarily. The lights were already dim, but when the main event began they were switched off completely and only a central spotlight provided illumination.

  Then Mickey reappeared, accompanied by another man equally well-built, and a very beautiful girl of twenty-three. I can be precise as to that, as she was one of mine. All three of them were almost naked. The other man carried some short slim lengths of nylon rope. He dropped them on the corner of the matting as he stepped onto it.

  The idea was for Mickey to take on the other two in a bout of wrestling, and although all-in, not of the variety transmitted on Saturday afternoons. For one thing, submission in this little charade had a different meaning; if Mickey emerged dominant, he dictated the kind of submission the other two were to submit to. But before that, he had to be able to have tied them up in order to proceed; and vice versa, if Mickey was the loser. For a lot of the audience, of course, the journey would be just as exciting as the arrival. It certainly had been for Jean. Propped next to her on the cushion, I could feel her body transmit the heat the contest generated as the trio writhed on the matting, the two trying to overcome the one and vice versa, all playing it very much for real, until Mickey decided it was he who was going to submit; he wouldn’t have unless he wanted to. The ropes securing his hands behind his back were finally knotted and the other two went to work on him.

  Then, after it was over, Mickey was released, and the trio were refreshed with champagne before the next event. For this a female member of the audience was to be invited to join, this time with Mickey against the other man. As I’d seen it all before I knew how the plot would work out. This time Mickey would win, and then whoever the girl was, she would help Mickey do to the other man what he had done to Mickey, and after that, unexpectedly, the girl who had previously supported the now subdued competitor would enter the act and attack the participant from the audience with a single mindedness which could only induce a desperate struggle in the audience participant, who invariably lost. In this part of the performance Mickey and the other man took no part.

  This was the part that Courtenay enjoyed best and which excited the audience most; the request for the audience participant was just that, a request. An invitation. Who would have the bottle to take pa
rt? Who would submit to this kind of sexuality in front of an audience of household names? Would it be one of the names themselves? And who would survive the unexpected and total humiliation of the final act of the entertainment provided and then for the rest of the weekend maintain the cool of her usual exterior? This, to the guests, was also a great turn-on. I remember on this occasion catching a glance of Courtenay, Messalina-like in his expectancy, a lady from history whom he resembled not only in the manner of his sexual tastes.

  I also remember receiving Jean’s emotions at this particular point; it was the female member of the trio who touted the audience for its participant of another status, like a conjuror’s assistant. Perhaps every woman in the audience felt the same, but Jean expressed their collective mixed feelings in the way that she did absolutely nothing at all, was absolutely still, hardly breathing. And when, finally, a girl rose from the cushions, there was no great expulsion of breath from her, nor from the rest of the women in the audience, no joint expression of relief. It was as if, now the possibility of choice had been removed, their feelings were a mixture of expectancy and regret.

  Later, in our bed, Jean had said as much to me. What had been strongest in her mind had been the publicness of knowing a lot of the people in there.

  And if the participants had been unknown, and there had been no audience, I’d asked her?

  She hadn’t answered my question with words.

  THE SMOKE

  WHEN I GOT TO the Steering Wheel, only Johnny Sheperdson was there. The other four were elsewhere for the moment. Naturally I got the full treatment from the management, just as the Shepherdsons would have got at one of my places. The only thing they didn’t do before I passed through into the main part of the club was to press my trousers for me.

  Johnny was sitting in the deep red leather booth where they always sat, his artificial leg straight and rigid beneath the table. There was no one else in the place. On the table in front of him was a mix of Bucks Fizz. He was pouring some of it into a tall glass as I approached the booth. He was the youngest of the five of them by quite a few years. I made him around twenty-seven or -eight. If he hadn’t been family they’d have concreted him up years ago. In my opinion he drank too much.