It was spring when he came, the yellow hammers were darting over the fields of winter wheat and Sam the farmer was out for the first time that year, poisoning wild flowers in the lane.

When he was poisoning wild flowers Sam always wore what looked like a rubber diving suit, on the back of which were twin canisters, with a spray hose attached that he worked with a lever up and down. Like aqualungs of death they were, those canisters, if you were a Bee Orchid or a Bluebell.

The two things Sam the farmer liked were killing things that he didn’t get a grant for keeping alive and grabbing land, especially on a nice spring day.

The narrow muddy lane that bordered my house, the lane where Sam stood in his space suit, was solely an access road that ran to the dilapidated asbestos sheds and concrete hard standing that lay behind my home. The sheds were where Sam housed whatever poor creatures he was being subsidised to torture that year: pigs that he sold as pork to the American airbases, hens, sheep, elephants, unicorns. Thus the lane belonged to him, but right up against the lane ran my fence, the side fence of my long front garden, so Sam’s road had only a narrow verge. A few months after I moved to the village Sam offered to mend my fence for me, it was falling to pieces in places.

He did a fine job of fixing it but without me noticing he also moved it a foot into my garden, so that Sam now had a fine wide verge. The rest of the village despised me for being so easily duped, for not even noticing that I’d been robbed of a precious twelve-inch-wide strip of grass, for continuing to wave and smile hello to Sam and Mrs Sam as they sat in lawn chairs on their slate smooth grass, in front of their three-car garage. It confirmed their opinion of me as an effete fop.

Nevertheless since that event Sam had felt a strange, uneasy sensation concerning the theft that he had never identified to himself as guilt, farmers knowing only four emotions: self-pity, greed, jealousy and inclinations towards suicide. Certainly since then, in a forgetful sort of way, he had looked out for my interests, if they didn’t conflict with his own. He never gave me the land back though.

My name is Hillary Wheat, I am seventy-two years old, I came to the Northamptonshire village of Lyttleton Strachey thirty years ago and I am still nowhere near fitting in. I don’t want you to think this is the cliché of rural suspicion towards outsiders. It is just me.

The couple who live in the other semi-detached house joined to mine, a pop-eyed pair of social workers called Mike and Michaela Talmedge, have a sixteen-year-old daughter called Suki. Suki has a boyfriend called Bateman who is a six foot three inches tall, cross-dressing black man with dyed blue hair and a ring through his nose. With her parents’ enthusiasm Bateman has come to live with Suki in the parents’ house, in her childhood bedroom, still hung with Take That posters. On summer afternoons with the windows open I can hear them having mildly perverted sex, the crack of leather on black man. Bateman fitted right in.

No matter how hard I have tried to shake it off there is some quality that hangs over me of diffidence, taste, restraint, politeness, that really, really, annoyed the inhabitants of Lyttleton Strachey. In the village pub, which our mad quacking landlady had re-named The People’s Princess after the famous traffic casualty, I would enter to mumbled ‘How do’s …’ then sit quiet and annoying in the corner with a flat pint of Hook Norton Bitter. ‘Bitter?’ the duck landlady would ask when I entered.

‘A little …’ I would always reply (apart from a ‘no, more rueful I would say …’ phase in the early Eighties). It just made people angry. Even couples who had motored over from Banbury and had never been in the pub before felt a frisson of irritation at my entrance.

By contrast Bateman would blast in, dressed in a ball gown worn over lycra cycling shorts, usually shouting the catchphrase from some television commercial, and all the lads, Marty Spen, Paul Crouch, Miles Godmanchester, Ronny Raul, would be pleased as punch to see him. There would be shouts and banter and lots of admiring questions for the black man about what it was like to be a black man or a black woman.

If I had been some sort of spy my diffident qualities would have stood me in good stead in Lyttleton Strachey. But I’m not a spy, I’m just a lonely old man.

A lonely old man in exile. At least when the Tsars sent their troublesome citizens to Siberia they had others there to greet them, to argue with, to go hunting with, to make love to and the possibility of escape. It always sounded like a rather nice winter break to me, excellent après ski, dancing lessons from Leon Trotsky, a talk on penguins by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a sort of Sandals of the Steppes.

But I am my own gaoler so there is no escape.

My name is Hillary Wheat, I am seventy-two years old and once, a long time ago, I was what the newspapers called a ‘well known poet’. I was never avant garde, preferring clear simple words about love and buttons and buses, that rhymed. God forgive me but I also used my popularity to distend myself into a celebrity. The television made an hour-long film about me that was shown at prime time on the BBC, this being in the time when they used to force feed self-improving stuff down the public’s gullet, hoping to swell their brains like Sam crammed bits of their relatives and diseased swill down the gullets of his poor animals. I also had my own weekly radio programme and once made an advert for breakfast cereal in which there was an amusing play on my surname. Wheat.

 

My descent into Northamptonshire began some time during 1968 and a lunch with my publisher, the late Blink Caspari, of Caspari and Millipede. For some time I had been having difficulty in contacting him. His secretary kept saying he was ‘in a meeting’.

Lying in this way was a business practice recently imported from the United States, like time and motion studies, so that when she said he was in a meeting I thought he was actually in a meeting. ‘He’s in more meetings than the general secretary of the TUC,’ I joked. You may not remember it but the TUC was a powerful organisation back then, for trade unionists, run by a man with strange hair. (It occurs to me I should perhaps explain what trade unionists used to be. But then where would I stop? Threepenny bits? Moral rearmament? Emotional inhibition? Ministerial responsibility? Sexual restraint?)

After a lot of phone calls I had managed to get my publisher to invite me to lunch at a restaurant in Camden Town that Blink described over the phone as ‘sort of France at the time of the First World Warrey’. It was down some stairs.

I said to Blink as we went down the stairs, ‘I thought when you said it was France at the time of the First World War you meant a Belle Époque sort of thing, a return to the classicism of Escoffier.’

‘No, what I meant,’ said Blink, ‘is that it’s France during the First World War.’

By this time we were in what I supposed was the restaurant. I stared about me. We had passed through a door into another time. The underground room we had entered was a re-creation of a brasserie in the centre of a town in Northern France sometime in the middle of the year’ 1917, right in the middle of the First World War. The café had seemingly a few hours before taken a number of direct hits from a salvo of high explosive shells. Jagged holes had been blasted through the walls in several spots, giving views of distant, badly painted underground fields, the shell holes had been, apparently, hastily half-filled with sandbags. Two old-fashioned Vickers machine guns were mounted on top of the sandbags, belts of ammunition coiling from their cocked breeches. There had been a recent firefight between the shop window dummies of the Allied powers and the shop window dummies of the Central powers: casualties lay blood-splattered in the uniforms of the German, French and British armies, sprawled in stiff attitudes of death across the bags of sand.

All the waiters were got up to look like members of the French general staff and the tables and chairs were rough hewn, shrapnel-blasted mismatches such as would be found in any bunker. On each table there was an old-style field telephone that you could wind up and speak to anybody who took your fancy at another table, these field telephones were taking seriously the current injunction to ‘Make Love Not War’. Playing on a continuous tape loop via speakers buried in the walls was the crump and whine of artillery. Every half an hour there was a small explosion of smoke and sparks from beyond the sandbags.

It occurs to me now, thirty-odd years later, that each period interprets the past in its own particular way. So though to myself and Blink (and I expect to the many survivors of the Great War who were still bumbling around in that year of 1968) the brasserie looked utterly authentic, viewed from our own age, from now, the place would appear irredeemably 1 960s. And if anybody at this moment would wish to make a brand-new, bombed-out, early twentieth century brasserie, it would look very different.

‘You were in the last war weren’t you, Hillary?’ said Blink as we sat down.

‘No, too young.’

‘You fought somewhere though, didn’t you? I’m sure you did. Had a life-changing experience somewhere, there was a poem about it I’m certain.’

‘Yes, Kenya, ‘52, ‘53.’

‘No heebie jeebies though?’

‘Not so as you’d notice.’

‘Ah good. I suddenly got a bit worried this place might bring it back … if you’d been in France and if there was anything to bring back. Lot of the teachers at my prep school were the most barking mad fellows from the first war, gibbering and crying at all hours and trying to grab your cock in the showers.’

‘I don’t think war is very much like this,’ I said.

‘No, I don’t suppose it is,’ said Blink.

‘You in the war, Blink?’

‘In the war? Not really. Old enough but medically unfit. Asthma. Eventually after a lot of badgering friends of the family they gave me command of an anti-aircraft gun in Regents Park, in the evenings after work. Do you remember at the start of the war, before things got organised, they let groups of chums form up Home Guard anti-aircraft batteries together? I was in charge of a bofors gun manned by the most ferocious pack of modernist architecture students from the Architects Institute in Portland Place. Spent most of my time stopping them from taking potshots at old buildings that they violently disapproved of! Still not entirely sure they didn’t blow up the old Abelard and Helois department store in Oxford Street, one minute it was there then the next…’ He paused while a shell in stereo seemed to whistle overhead, then went on. ‘… Well, it was still there but it had a lot of really big holes in it and it was on fire and I can’t say I remember the sound of any planes overhead or the sirens going off or anything. Still it was a frightful old Victorian pile, better off without it. I think it’s an Arts Lab now.’ Then, studying the menu which was printed on maps showing the movements of great armies across the plains of Picardy, ‘What’ll you have, old man?’

I remember I felt myself to be another anachronism. I had dressed that morning in my second-best town clothes: a navy chalk-stripe single-breasted suit made by my tailors in Savile Row, club tie, cream Gieves and Hawkes shirt, silver cufflinks from Aspreys, Church’s black Oxford lace ups, silk socks, cashmere navy-blue overcoat, on my wrist my father’s old Smiths watch. All a mistake, silly vain old peacock. Dapper I might have looked standing by the Cenotaph or somewhere similarly old fellowish but not in that place. I looked like I was lunching my son, perhaps as a well done for getting his first top-ten disc or to celebrate him choreographing his first nude musical, despite the fact that Blink was ten years older than me.

Once we had ordered and General Petain or possibly Marshall Foch had thrown our first course down in front of us, I said, ‘So, Blink, I wanted to talk to you about where the firm sees me going in the next few years.

Blink stared unblinkingly into my eyes.

‘And I want you to look around, Hillary, the times they are a’ changin’.’

Obediently I looked around as I had been told to. It seemed to me more than changin’, the times were a’ gettin’ all a’ jumbled up. As was the new fashion, several of the young men and even the young women at the other tables were wearing bright red Edwardian Royal Guardsmen’s tunics. They looked as if they had somehow slipped through time into the wrong war and although there were newspapers on sticks to be read they were all from February 1917.

‘Yes, if you say so, Blink.’

‘Caspari and Millipede has to change with them. Pan global corporatisation is coming whether we like it or not and as of next month Caspari and Millipede will be folded into the publishing arm of the Deutsche Submarine Corporation.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said.

‘Now our top money people have looked at the figures for this merger from top to bottom and they say they can’t see any way at all that it won’t be total and absolute financial suicide but all the leading futurologist watchers say that pan global corporatisation is the coming thing, so we can’t afford to be left behind. Hillary, Hillary, I assure you, you will not notice the difference. There will be absolutely no changes … except that the publishing department will be moving to Hounslow, authors’ editors will be drawn from a poo1 rather than assigned individually and our poetry list will be slimmed down considerably. On the upside you do get reduced-price travel on West German and Danish ferries.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said again. ‘You know that I’ve been with Caspari and Millipede since the mid Fifties, your father signed me to the firm. I’m bewildered that he’s gone along with all this.’

‘I know, remarkable isn’t it? But be assured that Dad-dad agrees with me one hundred and fifty-seven per cent.’

Indeed remarkable, since, apart from any other considerations, Paul Caspari had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic during the convoy war and when he amongst the survivors had bobbed to the freezing surface they had been machine-gunned by the lurking German submarine. What I couldn’t be aware of at the time was that Paul Caspari was, with good reason, extremely frightened of his son. Not expecting any opposition, Blink had simply told his father that the firm, which he had founded, would be taken over by the DSC. Blink was shocked when the father had for once objected and said that maybe they should think about it. The son had had to roll on the floor spitting and screaming and tearing great chunks of foam Out of the furniture with his teeth to try and get his own way, and when even that hadn’t worked he’d run at his father and punched him hard on the nose, blood and bone flying everywhere. Apparently everybody else at the board meeting had been terribly embarrassed.

When you know all this, it makes it a lot less surprising that Blink was murdered by his own adopted son a few years later, clubbed to death with a hammer.

 

You can’t stroll down to the shops here in the country like you can in a town. Everybody in Lyttleton Strachey, apart that is from me, likes to do their shopping once a month in one of the out of town superstores that encircle nearby Banbury like Visigoth encampments. On coming home with the carrier bags in the boot of the hatchback they cram their elephant-coffin-sized freezers with ready meals to be defused later in the microwave. The extra time they save by doing all their shopping in one place at one time is used, as far as I can tell, to argue about money with their wives, download child porn from the internet or simply to drool spittle onto the dining-room table.

Briefly a deluded couple with a dangerous dream came down from London and opened a shop in the village offering for sale fresh local produce and poultry from nearby farms, daily deliveries of fish and organic stone-ground bread, all of it beautifully presented with elegant hand-written little notes. The inhabitants of Lyttleton Strachey could hardly contain their horror at the abomination that was come into their midst and all, again apart from myself, boycotted the place with a rare unanimity and determination of purpose. The shop soon went broke and closed down. The husband hanged himself from the oak tree on the village green, which many reckoned was no more than he deserved for trying to make them eat notfrozen peas.

Sam the farmer went one better than the other villagers and did all his shopping in Northern France at a huge discount warehouse called Mutantsave somewhere outside of Arras. This was not an easy option for him to take: Sam did not speak any French and refused to learn, so in the French discount warehouse he often had no idea what he was buying. Sam only knew there was a lot of it and it was cheap. He had once had a violent fist fight with an Algerian over the one remaining gigantic drum of something called ‘Akkaspekki’ priced at a dazzling FF 28. Sam still had no idea what the stuff was for, nevertheless he knew the answer would come to him one day, he just hoped it would be before September 2009 when the akkaspekki had to be ‘à consommer’ by. Even when he was fairly certain that what he had bought was food, Sam and Mrs Sam had only the vaguest notion what the ‘Conseils de Preparation’ were. Dinners at the Sams had often consisted of raw Paella Royale avec Volaille et fruits de mer or boiled pheasant until they had begun inviting me to dinner so that I could translate cooking instructions. It was a measure of my loneliness that I went.

Sam the farmer had another reason for shopping in France apart from parsimony: it gave him an excuse to go somewhere in his car. In the thirty years that I had lived opposite him he had become rich. Since the hard working hairdressers and photographers’ assistants of the European Community had started giving a slice of their income to Sam he had more money than the Sultan of Brunei’s brother Prince Jefrey would know what to do with, but coupled with a farmerly dislike of ostentation. Luckily the motor industry had developed a type of car for the likes of him. ‘Q’ cars the motor magazines called them after the disguised German merchant ships that would sashay around neutral waters in a trollopy way enticing allied warships to get too close then flipping back their sides to reveal dangerous guns. ‘Q’ cars were ordinary family saloons but fitted with powerful turbo-charged engines, sports suspensions and four-wheel drive; in shades of pale colours they looked the same as plain motors yet screamed past Porsches on the motorway. Sam’s first was a 4x4 Cosworth Sierra, then a Lotus Carlton 3.6 litre twin turbo, now he had a Subaru Impreza Turbo P1, 280 bhp, 4 wheel drive, 0 to 60 in 4.6 seconds. He would strap himself into his blue racing harness and hurtle to France at four in the morning, blazing down the Ml, M25, M20 onto the cheap-offer ferry. Off the other end, racing spoilers scraping the ramp. Rumbling into the car park of Mutantsave as they opened, turbos crackling and cooling, to fill up his boot with boxes and cartons and pallets of cheap things.

 

When he came, he came in a green Landrover van.

A few days before, I had dinner with the Sams. As I sat down in their ‘clean as a place where they make microchips’ living room Sam entered waving a bottle. ‘I thought we might have this with dinner, Hillary, what do you say?’

I studied the label.

‘Um … I don’t think so, Sam, you see it’s a bottle of shampoo.’

‘But it mentions berries,’ argued Sam, unable to face the fact that he’d wasted five francs.

‘To add lustre to our hair if it is dry or medium to dry.’

Eventually he turned up a box of mixed Australian wines bought at a place called Booze Bonkers, which was just outside Caen apparently.

‘Sam, would you by any chance be going to France before Wednesday?’ I asked.

His eyebrows went up, wrinkling his forehead and shiny bald pate at the prospect of an adventure. Sam’s big yellow farming machines that went about doing his work in the fields were connected to the house by global positioning satellite which he could access from anywhere in the world on his laptop, so he would always be able keep in touch with the damage he was doing, even on the RNl.

‘Well, I wasn’t planning to … but I don’t see why I couldn’t.’ Sam was always ready for a drive.

‘Please don’t if you weren’t . .

‘No, no a midnight drive is always agreeable and they say penicillin is much cheaper over there so I was plannin’ to get some. Is there summink you wanted me to get you then?’

‘Well, erm … um … just some cakes, patisserie if you could … I seem to be having a young man to tea on Thursday and it’s so hard to get any decent cakes round here.’

‘A young man?’ rumbled Mrs Sam who had entirely the wrong idea about me and young men since I had had no female companionship in the thirty years they had known me.

Sam’s wife, known only as Mrs Sam, was a tall thin woman who kept their house very clean and rarely spoke, but when she did it was in a surprisingly deep voice, rather reminiscent of a Negro from the deep south of the United States. When she addressed you at the dinner table it was as if you were being asked if you would like another serving of mousseline de tête de grenouille by the famous singer Mr Paul Robeson.

‘Yes, he’s something called a Million Pound Poet. Whatever that is. He telephoned me a little while back and said he admired my work and could he meet me for a chat? So I invited him for tea. It’s such a long time since anybody’s got in touch with me and well, you know, I did that a lot when I was young, it was quite the done thing. Write to a poet or author you admired and they were often frightfully good about inviting you round for tea, to talk about their work, sort of help out the next generation. Powell, Forster, though 1 think he was a little too interested in young men coming round; Ted Hughes of the more modem persuasion of poet served a particularly fine sort of scone with currants in it that you could only get at a little bakers in Names that meant nothing to the Sams.

‘Are you still writing your poems?’ said Sam. ‘I didn’t think you wuzz writin’ your poems. I didn’t think you’d written any poems since you had come ere.’

Sam would always be the one to say to a leper ‘Wo’s wrong with your nose then, mate?’ In fact, he would be pleased with himself, he would think he was doing the leper a favour by being so blunt and outspoken, and by not trying to ignore the deformity but coming right out and mentioning it plain and simple.

‘Well, as a matter of fact, as you’ve been kind enough to point out, I haven’t, hadn’t written for thirty years but now suddenly I’ve, well I hardly dare say it …

I was making the Sams uneasy with my giddy tone.

‘But I’ve started again, only mapping it out at this point. It’s a long poem and erm …’ I was losing them now, but anyway I can feel it’s back, the power very different but also the same. Would you like to know what it’s about?’

Sam said, ‘No we wouldn’t, no. We’re very happy you’re writing again but that’s about the limit of our interest really.’

‘Yes, fair enough. I must say I’m rather sorry that he’s coming to see me, the Million Pound Poet, because I can only write during the day for a few brief hours, and even the prospect of somebody coming to see me stops me for days. Still one has to be polite …’

Polite. Politeness, my own affliction more disabling than arthritis. I do look on it as an affliction, an inability to make clear my own feelings, to state my own desires. I have always been that way. I imagine I was influenced by all the poets and writers who infested our house in Old Church Street like termites when I was a child, weeping and borrowing money that they never repaid, molesting the staff and stealing the sugar bowls. It would have been good for them to restrain their desires, even if only once a year. Would have kept them out of the courts or the River Thames or the private clinic that everybody knew about in Wimpole Street. But it never occurred to them even for a second.

 

Surprising then that from when I was a child my only ambition had been to be a poet. At my prep school there were several boys in my class who wanted to be poets, it was that kind of school, others wanted to be fighter pilots, engine drivers and one boy wanted to be a cow, but there was a fair crowd of us nine-year-old aesthetes.

My father, Vyvyan Wheat, had returned from the First World War to become an editor at Fabers. As a baby I had been sick over the first draft of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. With my father I had got the Number 14 bus from Chelsea to Red Lion Square then walked past the British Museum to take tea with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, a remote creepy woman whom I was afraid of. As a final pilgrimage I had gone with my ailing father down to Southampton Docks to throw lumps of coal at Auden and Isherwood as the two cowards had set sail for America, just ahead of the Second World War.

 

I said to Blink, ‘I’m sorry but I don’t feel I can stay with Caspari and Millipede under this new ownership. I’m sure many other publishers would be glad to have me.

‘Of course they would be, Hillary.’

But of course they wouldn’t be, Hillary.

They did a similar thing to Barbara Pym round about the same time. You can now buy her books again all over the place but in the 1970s and 1980s it would have been impossible. Back in the unswinging Fifties she was enormous, top-five successful novelist, then more or less on one day something in the air changed: the executives at her own publishing company and the critics on all the big newspapers and magazines decided she wasn’t any good any more. Though she had been good the day before, somehow now she wasn’t. I suppose these people have to believe they have some special power, that they know ahead of time when an artist is played out. So if they bring it about, they make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are scientists who can affect the outcome of their experiments. Poor Barbara kept writing books and her editor would be unenthusiastic and they wouldn’t get published. And she thought it was her fault, but it wasn’t: it was fashion’s fault, it was their fault, all the others. Nobody put her books out till they decided to dig her up at the end of her life. Too late, too late.

 

After my lunch with Blink I went home feeling terribly agitated, perhaps suspecting some of what was to come. My wife was in the hall arranging some flowers on the hall table. At that time we lived in an apartment block on the edge of Hampstead Heath which was called Isopod One and had been designed in the international style, along socialist principles, by a famous architecture collective called the Isopod. There had once, before the war, been a communal canteen on the ground floor that had served nourishing vegetarian meals for sixpence and a bar where there had been folk concerts. It’s derelict now.

‘How was your lunch with Blink?’ she asked.

‘Catastrophic.’

‘I said you should have gone to Claridges.’

‘No, not in that way. Well, in that way too, but the most extraordinary thing. Caspari and Millipede are being taken over by the German Poison Gas Corporation or some such, so I’ve told them I’m leaving.’

I had married for the second time to a much younger woman. My new wife, Annabelle, was taller than myself, blonde, sweet-faced, with wonderful straight posture that emphasised her perfect breasts, and she had always had terrible trouble getting men to have sex with her. Fellows at the university she went to were always finding her in their beds after parties, looking all tousled and saying things like ‘Oh I’m just so tired, can’t I stay the night here? We don’t have to do anything, honestly, we can just hold each other.’ Or she was constantly taking up the bizarre pursuits of men she fancied, such as real tennis or robotics, in order to get closer to them; it didn’t work, though she could probably have designed a tennis-playing robot long before Pete Sampras came along.

On the other hand my first wife, Frances, had been a small bandy woman with a substantial moustache and a fine collection of moles who had, sometimes literally, had to beat men, especially Arthur Koestler, off with a stick (which he had liked very much indeed).

My first wife Frances had abandoned me soon after I became famous with my first collection of poems, saying that she found celebrity ‘tacky’. She went to live on a kibbutz in Israel which collapsed in violence because of the sexual tension she generated. After that Frances had wandered the Middle East and the ructions she caused were a powerful factor in the rise of Muslim fundamentalism.

My young wife Annabelle had married me because I had felt her up at a bottle party in Mayfair without her begging me to. It was a surprise to me and all in our circle when she gassed herself, after I had left Caspari and Millipede and no other publisher would take me. Nobody knew that my fame had been so essential to her, most assumed instead that she’d been having an affair with Ted Hughes.

In truth we would have been able to stand me losing my publisher but it was the court case that really did for us. Now we live in more crack-up conscious times and it is well known and understood that those under stress, often without knowing they are doing it, find that they have been stealing little things, shoplifting in other words. Even back then, if I had been caught walking out of Fortnums with a jar of pickled walnuts under my coat they might not have pressed charges but the Zoo felt they could not be so understanding. Also I had my accursed ubiquity to blame, for one of the many tasks outside poetry that I had taken on was my own regular radio programme broadcast on the Home Service, called The Moral Low Ground, on which each week I would deliver an extemporised lecture, entirely without notes, on some aspect of the decline of manners and morality in society: unmarried mothers, hire purchase, lack of civility in daily life, association footballers earning more than ten pounds a week — plus shoplifting, of course. And although the penguin had suffered no injuries, indeed it was me who had been badly pecked underneath my coat, at Wandsworth Crown Court the beak sent me down for three months and I was pilloried in the press for hypocrisy and animal cruelty. This last charge particularly hurt since I had always been a keen supporter of animal rights and I think in my stress-addled mind I was only taking the penguin home because it looked cold.

With no wife, I sold the flat in the Isopod and with all of my savings bought this little house in Lyttleton Strachey. To exile myself, to punish myself, to not have to come face to face with an old friend in the Strand. I retained the best of the furniture from our Hampstead apartment, at that time the exemplar of restrained urban taste: Hille couch and armchairs in wood and moquette, Heals sideboard in sycamore, an original Ercol dining-room set, Luminator lamps from Arte Luce, Aubusson needlepoint rugs. All as incongruous as myself in what was little more than a rural council house built for the chauffeur of the Manor House, now itself converted to apartments. And I kept my clothes, which also looked out of place in their new bucolic home.

Yet along with my hunting rifle and an ugly PVC hat Larkin had given me that I’d never liked, I seemed to have left the ability to write poetry back in London.

 

Once my inspiration had been lost and I had come to this place I still stuck to the working routine of a poet. For thirty years, on weekdays, for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon I sat at my G-plan desk in the middle, small bedroom, which looked out over the fields at the rear of the house and wrote … nothing, basically nothing: the odd line sometimes, a fragment some days; whole poems once or twice convinced me at lunchtime that my gift had returned and as early as the same afternoon they would be revealed as complete rubbish. Once, over four days of fevered creativity, I definitely wrote something that was quite good. Unfortunately it had already been written a hundred years before by the Victorian sentimentalist Coventry Patmore.

Except now was different. In the last two months I hardly dared look at it, hardly dared contemplate it, but something real had come back. After thirty years of being mute a tiny feeble voice had begun to hesitantly speak its lines. I couldn’t quite hear what it was saying but I sat each day at the desk in that middle bedroom, grandly named my study, which overlooked the asbestos sheds into which Sam crammed whatever animal it was most profitable for him to abuse that year, and listened closely to what it was trying to say to me.

And what it wanted to talk about was what had been in front of me all along, it was the view out of my study window. When I first arrived, sitting at the same desk and looking out of the same window, the view was of a patchwork of small fields, some edged with trees, one with a large pond in the middle and over to the far left of my vista was a very charming coppice of ancient broadleaf native trees. Now there was nothing except a vast single expanse of bright yellow rape. (Who named it that? Was it someone with a sense of humour?) Such vivid colour, the shade of an RAC man’s protective jacket, always seemed out of place to me in the English countryside. Over the years the hedges had started disappearing, the pond was filled in and I could still remember the dreadful day they started the destruction of the coppice. So from diversity had come uniformity, from variety, monotony. It was the same when I went on one of my walks in the neighbourhood: years ago one guaranteed pleasure was hearing and seeing all the different birds — now with the hedges and lots of the trees gone you could walk for hours and hear only the odd wood pigeon. There seemed to be lots more paths back then too, so you could take a turning you’d never spotted before and go on not knowing where it would take you. Now all the local paths seemed to have been tarmaced and they all led to more or less identical housing developments. The realisation crept up on me that my journey from youth to age had been like that —       from an abundance of options to none, from countless choices and the promise of an infinity of unknowns to a straight path leading inexorably to the last remaining unknown, the grave.

The poem taking shape in my head was to be an epic or perhaps more accurately a long meditative poem in the style of Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’ or ‘The Excursion’. I had toyed at first with giving it narrative form, giving my ideas the form of a story, but after some weeks wrestling with an everyman character and his life journey I realised that this was unspeakably banal. Further weeks passed while I re-read some of the greater epics, including Seamus Heaney’s translation of ‘Beowulf’. I must admit the reviews for this had made me wildly jealous: ‘Heaney has chosen the plain prosaic yet subtly cadenced vernacular of his Northern Irish roots as the poetic voice into which he renders the Anglo-Saxon epic. He evokes the highly alliterative texture of Anglo-Saxon verse … brilliant, genius’ etc., etc. And then the bloody thing was a huge best-seller! A lot of those buying it seemed to think he had made the story up himself. I wondered whether I should just translate ‘Le Chanson de Roland’ into the clipped cadences of a Second World War officer and pass it off as a modern comment on war rather than attempting the great original task ahead of me. I calmed myself down by re-reading ‘The Iliad’, ‘The Odyssey’ and of course ‘Paradise Lost’. This last seemed, given the subject matter of my poem, an obvious verse form to follow. But since one object of poetry is to arouse emotion, to induce a certain state of being, to enlarge the imagination into unvisited realms, the stanza form and threatening rhythms of Milton’s epic did not fit my aim of rousing both melancholy and anger in my reader. The cadence and the emotional emphasis were not what I wanted.

Then, while tending my vegetables, I recalled that for Rimbaud a poem usually first took place in his mind through some folk tune running through his head. He was inspired first by the impelling sense of rhythm, and I wondered for a while if what I had to say could be said in a simple ballad form. I worked with this for a while but realised that it was not subtle enough for the whole poem, though I thought it might work for the middle section. The dawn of false hope. I realised I was being inevitably drawn to the rhymes and rhythms of the ‘Divine Comedy’. A vague idea had stirred while I was reading Louis MacNeice’s long poem ‘Autumn Journal’ written in tercets, but it was while reading Part II of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ that it struck me that, though unrhymed, the poem was also written in tercets, the form favoured by Dante. The pace is subtle but relentless — exactly the mood I wanted to convey in my own epic. Dantesque terzarima has stanzas connected by rhyme (aba bcb cdc… and so on), each canto of the ‘Divine Comedy’ ends with a quatrain linking with the preceding tercet thus: uvu vwvw.

I could use this to emphasise the inevitability of what has preceded and the compelling necessity of what is to come.

 

When he came he was wearing the most ridiculous clothes.

As I said before it really was rather a bother that this Million Pound Poet was calling round at all but I couldn’t turn him away.

Excessive politeness appears to be a common disease of the early twentieth century which, like polio and scarlet fever, has largely been eradicated from modern society but I am too old to have been inoculated. I could no more have turned him away than I could be intentionally cruel to a penguin.

Though I was sure that my poem was the real thing at last, progress was still painfully slow. I seemed to need the long hours of solitude that had once been torture to me to bring out the shy voice, it didn’t seem to want to come out if there was somebody else in the room, indeed if there was even somebody coming to visit. A note or a scrambled thought was the yield of most days and that left me as drained and wan as if I was having chemotherapy. Now I hadn’t even been able to achieve that modest output for fretting about my visitor.

 

I got back to the house only a few minutes before he came, even though I had spent all morning fussing about the tea spread.

At 7 a.m. Sam had rapped on my door and, looking over his shoulder like some drugs courier, he had wordlessly handed over a big box still warm from the ovens of an all-night Franco—Morrocan patisserie that he knew about, situated on the industrial zone of St Malo. Then at almost the appointed hour I felt it somehow wasn’t quite enough, so with only ninety minutes to go I got on my moped and rode into the nearest place that still had shops, which was Towcester. There I planned to buy four of a special kind of small cheesecake that was made only at this one cake shop called Mr Pickwick’s Olde Tea Shoppe at the northern end of town next to The Saracens Head Hotel, which was visited by Mr Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers. Cheesecakes that only came from one shop in all the world had to mean a pretty impressive tip-top teatime spread, even better than those that Pablo Neruda laid on. I was lucky, I got the last cakes. You had to get to the cake shop quite early and then be quite ruthless in the queue because they ran out of Towcester cheesecakes quite rapidly, always, I have to say, to the total bemusement and bewilderment of the cake-shop staff who were as shocked as anyone to find that there were suddenly no more of the special cheesecakes left. I had once suggested that they might like to consider the option of baking some more cheesecakes. The head woman just shouted, ‘No, we’re out! We’re out of cheesecakes! Have a big Lardy cake or a Belgian Bun, why don’t you!’ Then all the staff had run into a back room where they hid till I had gone away.

There was still a frisson of fear amongst the serving girls whenever I went in there; they bunched together, static sparking off their nylon coats, and snickered like gazelles at a watering hole snuffing the air, knowing that a lion crouched nearby in the long grass. I also bought some crumpets and an unsliced cottage loaf.

My moped. You had to have some sort of vehicle in the country because there were no buses or trains or trains and everything was a very long walk from everything else, usually along roads down which caroomed giant grain lorries, their drivers steering with, at the most, one hand, their other being used to pin the mobile phone to their ear as they talked to God knows who about God knows what.

Everybody else in Lyttleton Strachey pretty much had a car except one man at the council house end of the village who had four tanks, an armoured half track and a bren gun carrier crammed into his garden, though I don’t suppose they were strictly to get about in. I occasionally got the feeling that even some of the farmyard animals had their own cars. I could have sworn I’d seen one of Sam’s pigs at the wheel of an Alfa Romeo 156 on the back road into Banbury one day while I was out for a walk. However, on my modest income, my pension and the small cheques for some of my travel books on the canal architecture of Scotland which still sold well in Turkey, I couldn’t afford a car so instead I had a small moped, made in the 1970s and called a Honda Melody. It was purple with flowers stencilled on the side and it had a basket on the front to put things in; it was aimed at the woman rider. I had bought the machine for a hundred pounds from a farmer over near Sulgrave. It had been his daughter’s but she’d been mangled in a baling accident and didn’t need it any more because she had no hands.

The Honda Melody was powered — though that wasn’t really the right word giving, as it does, some image of puissance — by a 49cc two-stroke engine, so weak that going up the hill out of the next village, Woodford Halse, I had to stick my legs out and help it along with a strange man-on-the-moon walking motion. Sometimes I thought that one day if I ever again came into any money I would like to purchase a 125cc Peugeot Speedfight which all the motorbike magazines said was the best of the new style of fashionable scooters.

I buzzed back through the country lanes with half an hour to spare. I took off the brown leather American fighter pilot’s jacket that I had won in a poker game in Kampala in ‘54, clambered Out of the boiler suit which I wore over an old pair of corduroys from the Army and Navy Stores and a copy of a Daks shirt made for me by a Malay tailor in Singapore’s Orchard Road. I had a wash in cold water and changed into the clothes I had chosen to wear for tea, a brown herringbone wool and mohair suit from Simpsons of Piccadilly, Turnbull and Asser Tattershall shirt, knitted green wool tie and Grendon brogues that I had polished the night before.

Then I stood looking out of the living-room window.

A green Landrover van coming from the north shot past the end of the drive, disappeared out of sight round the bend, then a few seconds later came back in reverse with that characteristic whine of a Landrover gearbox under strain. It went past the house again, then came forward, turned up the drive and rocked to a halt on the concrete hard standing, the rattle of its diesel engine subsiding in diminishing coughs.

The door opened and a long leg stretched out, on its foot was a Cuban heeled boot, the leg itself was wearing a tight black bell-bottomed trouser. The leg hovered for a second then was joined by its twin, together they slid the few inches to the concrete. That was it for a while, perhaps a minute, then the legs were joined by the rest of the man. He was tall, over six foot, long gingery hair parted in the middle fell to his shoulders, sharp features behind a long beard. He wore a frilly white shirt and a knee-length patent leather coat, in his hand a black malacca cane with a silver top; the only note that didn’t fit in with the Aleister Crowley look was a hat of some grey material with writing on it, as might be worn by a young surfer or rapper.

My thinking had been that if things flagged between us we might be able go for a walk through the fields and along the green lanes to the knot of Scots pine trees that grew above where the railway used to run. But in his high-heeled boots and tight trousers, the Million Pound Poet had difficulty getting out of his own car and certainly would not be able to totter along the muddy paths or climb the several stiles on the way.

Having wriggled himself out from the Landrover, the Million Pound Poet stood and gazed at my house. He seemed disappointed; I imagine he’d expected a proper poet to live in something made of mellow creamy stone, probably with roses round the door. This looked like a council house, on the edge of a village certainly, with a big garden sure, but otherwise pretty much like some of the old ones in Daventry, from which direction he had come.

I stepped away from the window to fiddle with the tea things and waited for the doorbell to ring so that I could let him in. The first poet to visit me in thirty years.

I looked up from my teapot to see that he was standing in front of me, already in the room. My small living room that looked out both towards the village and Sam’s house over the road at the front and Sam’s fields at the back suddenly seemed too small. A quince bush that needed pruning tapped insistently on the back window as if wanting to be let into the party. I felt extremely awkward with him staring down at me and he didn’t seem in any mood to start speaking.

So I said, ‘Erm … hello. I’m Hillary Wheat.’

‘Yes, of course you are,’ he replied, stretching out a languid ring-drenched hand, ‘… and I’m Emmanuel Porlock. Sorry to startle you, the door was open so I strolled in.

I could have sworn that the door had been shut and locked.

‘Well, do sit down.’

He folded himself into my best armchair and looked around him, smiling.

I said, ‘Ah um … I had a vague picture of you in my mind as a smaller thinner man with longer dark hair.’

It turned out, like Gypsy Rose Lees, that there were two Million Pound Poets. He waved his hand dismissively, ‘You’re confusing me with a ponce called Murray Lachlan. Young, a scribbler of doggerel, disappeared now, a nine-minute wonder, not the real deal like me.’

‘So,’ I asked, ‘what does that mean exactly, a million pound poet?’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘It refers to my record deal. It’s a million pound record deal.’

I tried to surprise him. ‘Ah I see. But I sometimes watch, I think it’s called Behind The Music, on VH1 where they tell the stories of bands. And they often go on about how so many costs are built into record deals, by the record companies, that in reality what may seem like a million pounds turns out to be twenty pence in the artist’s pocket.’

‘Hillary, you are absolutely right, my friend. The Million Pound Poet tag is simply newspaper nonsense. We both know you don’t get rich through poetry. That’s not why we do it though, is it? It’s a need, a compulsion, an irresistible drive. Not for the money, no.’

On a pine trunk that had been dragged into the centre of the room I had laid out tarte armandine, cherry clafoutie, beignettes, raghif alsiniyyeh, muhallabia, quince compote, Towcester cheesecakes, toast: wholemeal and white, strawberry jam, apple jam, coffee and tea.

‘Do help yourself,’ I said.

‘Why thank you.’ He leant forward, took a plate and piled it with six or seven cakes.

For a while we talked about my poetry. He told me how much he liked ‘Coventry Town Centre’ and ‘The Hospital for Imaginary Diseases’, was more critical of ‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Mau Mau’, and didn’t like ‘Corrugated Irony’.

Then he embarked on the purpose of his visit. He tried to persuade me to re-enter public life. I felt a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film Commando, where the CIA try and lure him back into counter-terrorism from his life inhabiting a log cabin in the forests, chopping wood in his vest for a living. He said, ‘We could go on tour together, there’s quite a network of arts centres out there that put on poetry readings, the money’s good too and we’d make a great package. Two ages of poetry or something I thought we could call it.’

I said, ‘Well, this is all a bit sudden.’

He went on, perhaps thinking my horror was a negotiating tactic.

‘And there’s another thing, seventy per cent of poetry is bought by women, right? They like all that emotional truth, beauty, insights into the human condition and what have you. Some of them that come to readings on the circuit are very keen to sip at the fountain of beauty, if you know what I mean…’

I made some other polite evasion and as suddenly as the topic had come it went again. Instead he started to talk about the minutiae of his life in a big terraced house in Daventry.

He was one of those who used the names of people that they are involved with, without explaining who they are. So he would say, ‘Bev says that I should get a horse,’ or ‘Martika was making nasi goreng the other night when …’ or ‘Lulu has her Urdu lessons on a Tuesday night.’ These three, Bev and Martika and Lulu seemed to come up in a domestic capacity until the notion began to dawn that Bev and Martika were women and Lulu was the child of one of them and Emmanuel, and that Bev and Martika and Emmanuel lived together. Lived together like in a pamphlet that a particularly left-wing local council might put out. ‘Lulu lives with Bev and Martika and Emmanuel. Bev sleeps with Martika, Emmanuel sleeps with Bev, Martika sleeps with Emmanuel.’

When I had been a famous poet this sort of thing, while not unknown in Bohemia, always seemed short-lived and generally ended in alcoholism, rancour and suicide. This arrangement, however, from what he said seemed to be a happy one. I said to him, ‘I don’t wish to probe but do I take it that you live with these two women?’

‘Yes, Hillary, I do indeed live with Bev and Martika. I also have sex with Bev and Martika.’

‘So how does that work out then?’ seemed to have come out of my mouth without me having anything to do with it. Fortunately he was eager to expound.

‘Well, I do it with each of them and they with each other, though generally not the three of us together, with that you tend to spend all the time rearranging each other like St John’s Ambulance practice dummies. Our daughter Lulu’s cool about it, all our parents are cool about it apart from Martika’s father and Bev’s Auntie Glym who we suspect of a drive-by shooting at our house.’

‘Even these days I must say it still seems a most unusual arrangement.’

‘It shouldn’t be, Hillary, it shouldn’t be. It makes me crazy. There are so many more ways to live than are sanctioned in our society. Take all these couples, for instance, man and wife living in these little houses all around here,’ he waved his arm about as if they were in the living room, ‘… wrapped up together all sterile and tight like a pair of pork chops on a supermarket freezer shelf. Say one of them fancies a bit of a change, a different hole, but they can’t, can they? Not without lying, scurrying about like a rat or risking bringing their whole world crashing down. Then there’s all this blame that goes around when somebody goes off somebody else. You don’t get the blame if you go off prawn tikka masala, do you? People don’t go around saying “Have you heard about Toby? The bastard’s gone off prawn tikka masala! A friend of Pauline’s saw him in town eating aloo gobi and pilau rice with a side order of brindal bhaji! The faithless bastard!” But you would go off prawn tikka masala if you were eating it every night, wouldn’t you?’

He leant forward and helped himself to some tarte armandine and a Towcester cheesecake.

‘Or take all these single women that there are, lovely girls all about, going without love from one year to the next because, well we know don’t we, you and me Hillary, that the single available men out there are, to put it kindly, sub-human, knuckle-dragging mutants with radioactive hair growing out of their arseholes. You wouldn’t even want Mrs Thatcher to have sex with one of them would you? So to take on two or three of them, and for them to take on each other, it makes perfect sense. Hillary, what I say and do, is if we live in looser… tribes if you will, these problems of modern society simply fade away, we spread out the load … companionship, sex, protection, become available to everyone, not just a lucky few. I do not believe we are meant to live alone, my friend. God created us to live in a tribe then man told us to live in Milton Keynes. It is all wrong, Hillary.’

 

All that followed in subsequent months sprang from this conversation. I had always lived my life according to Flaubert’s dictum: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’ It was all that sustained me through my thirty years of self-imposed exile for the crime of zoolifting. Good manners, politeness, moderation, the consolations of conventional morality, these were my tranquillisers. Now it occurred to me, ludicrously, for the first time at the age of seventy-two: ‘What if I was wrong, what if I was mistaken in the way I have chosen to carry on my life?’ That somebody could live out such a fantasy of perfection as Porlock lived, seemed to shake something loose in me that I had always attempted to ignore. I had maintained to myself that there was a price to pay for immorality, there had to be, hadn’t there? But was it simply some idea I had developed when I was a schoolboy and had never revised? I had made myself pay it. I had imagined the gods to be some kind of ticket inspector who would always know if you hadn’t paid your fare, and if you hadn’t would inflict a substantial fine. But when I listened to commuters talking in the pub they said that these days the ticket inspector rarely, if ever, put in an appearance.

In this village there were so many who did terrible things and never seemed to give it a second thought. In London I had never known anybody who had ever done anything that you would call really bad. Poets, painters, actors, critics, the worst you could say was that one of them might have written an occasional overly waspish review or that another opted for the easy syllogism when a few extra minutes’ deliberation might have brought out a more profound and winning argument. But how they suffered, my former friends, for even these minor transgressions! The agonies of doubt and self-loathing, the suicide attempts, the grabbing at drink or psychiatrists or other men’s wives, in order to ease the terrible mental pain. None of them had ever crushed a cat’s spine for a living, nonetheless they twisted and toiled and sweated in their beds at night, raked by remorse and guilt. Yet in this village, and one can only assume in all these villages about, there were Sams and his kindred whose day’s work might involve the tearing up of hedgerows or the barbed wiring of ancient footpaths, the spreading of hormones or the jabbing of antibiotics. Then there were those such as Miles Godmanchester who was a senior employee at Daventry Life Sciences which had taken over the stately home on the bend of the road north of Lyttleton Strachey. At this animal Lubyanka all kinds of experiments were carried out on poor trapped beasts, the vast, vast, majority of these experiments pointless and all of them cruel beyond belief. Surplus rabbits are burnt alive in that place. Yet Miles Godmanchester clearly enjoyed his work, was popular and well-liked, nobody ignored him in the pub, nobody said when he came in, ‘Hello Miles, had a good day stabbing cats?’ At night in bed, I imagined, he woke for a second, smiled and turned over with a happy, contented sigh.

 

The Million Pound Poet said, ‘No, of course you don’t want to come on tour with me right this minute, you need all your time to be here because you’re writing again, aren’t you?’

I don’t understand how he could have known that.

 

Emmanuel Porlock went after it was dark, leaving me disturbed and unable to work.

On the doorstep as we were saying our goodbyes he took a cheap Nokia, pay as you go, mobile phone from his pocket and held it out to me on the palm of his hand.

‘You see this?’ he said. ‘Do you know what this is? It’s a telephone, yes it is. But it’s not connected with wires or anything, it’s a mobile telephone that I can phone people up with anywhere in the world, walking about or driving in my car or anywhere.’

‘Yes,’ I replied feeling confused, ‘a mobile phone, nearly everybody’s got one.’

‘Oh I don’t think so,’ he said, climbed into his green Landrover and drove off at speed without turning on his lights.

 

I sat at my desk for the next two days unable to write a word. My mind filled with Emmanuel and Bev and Martika. Bev I cast as WPC Lauren Haggeston, a character on a television police show that I watched regularly and which was called The Job. Some days, if you wished to, it was possible to watch two hours of The Job since UK Gold, a re-runs channel, would transmit two thirty-minute episodes from a couple of years back in the mornings, then ITV would show a brand-new, one-hour episode in the evening. Recently the producers of The Job had culled a lot of the crumpled real police-looking actors in favour of much prettier ones, WPC Lauren Haggeston was one of the new intake, being extremely thin but still with large breasts. I was interested to observe that the actress who played WPC Lauren Haggeston had actually appeared three years previously in the same show but on that occasion she was playing a crack dealer with a boyfriend in the Ukrainian mafia. This happened a lot on The Job: actors who were cast in the leading roles as police men and police women had almost always turned up earlier as criminals. I sometimes wondered whether the producers were making some subtle point about the moral duality of the police who must always carry a whiff of corruption about them; but I suppose it was just that the casting people simply liked to work with those they had already met and had found to be professional. In my fantasies of a life filled with sex the part of Martika was played by my dead second wife.

There’s that old joke: a footballer is told by his manager, ‘Play badly and I’ll pull you off at half time’, ‘Oh cheers, boss,’ says the footballer, ‘at my last club we only got a cup of tea and an orange.’ I was pulling myself off and it was nearly full time.

On the third day after Emmanuel Porlock the Million Pound Poet’s visit, I was starting to get back into thinking about maybe getting an idea about starting to work on my poem, when the telephone rang. It was him, Porlock, though he was one of those people who never say who they are on the telephone. His first words to me were, ‘Have you got my hat?’ No greeting, nothing, very impolite really.

‘Who is this, please?’

‘Have you got my hat?’

‘Hello, Emmanuel,’ I said.

‘Have you got my hat?’ he repeated. ‘The hat I was wearing when I came to see you, the grey hat, the Mau Mau hat.’

‘The Mau Mau hat?’

‘Yes,’ exasperated. ‘It’s a make of hat. Mau Mau, the name’s on the front. I was wearing it when I came to your house and now I can’t find it. I remember I had it on when I was driving to your house but I don’t remember if I was wearing it on the way back.’

I tried to recall whether he’d been wearing it on the doorstep when he’d shown me his mobile phone in the dark. ‘Well, I can’t remember but I’ll have a look for it.’

‘Yes, you do that now,’ and he rang off. We had only been in the living room and the hall so I turned up all the cushions but it wasn’t there. I looked behind the couch and the TV but it wasn’t there either. It wasn’t anywhere in my house. Fifteen minutes later and the phone rang again.

‘Did you find it?’

‘No I’m afraid not, I—’

‘Shit, fuck, I’ve got to have a Mau Mau hat. I can’t function without a Mau Mau hat. You’ll have to go up to London to get me another one. There’s nothing else for it. There’s a retro hat shop in Berwick Street Market that might just have one.

‘I’m not sure I can drop everything and … go up to London … my poem …

He started shouting, ‘I fucking lost it at your house! You’re responsible. You’ve got it somewhere or you’ve thrown it out, or you’ve given it to the boy scouts and you can’t remember because your fucking mind is going …’ There was a pause when I thought he was considering that he had gone too far. Then, ‘You’re not wearing it, are you?’

‘Of course I’m not wearing it.’

‘Alright then. I’ll ring you the day after tomorrow to find out how you got on in London.’ And he put the phone down.

 

When he’d said he knew I was writing poetry again it gave me an electric shock as if I was being worked over with a defibrillator by an untrained shop assistant in a mall.

‘How could you know that?’ I asked.

‘Oh you’ve a certain look about you, you know, like a lovely single girl who’s getting shagged regularly, after not getting it for a long time. So how does it feel after all this time to be doing it again? Quite a relief, I should think. I’m sure, if you’re anything like me, your entire sense of yourself must be tied up with your writing. I mean what are you, Hillary Wheat, without it? Another roly-poly old man in an out-of-date suit. It must have been terribly painful to be blocked out for all those years. I wonder if there’s a muse of the writers’ block, a sort of anti-muse who descends and uninspires the struggling artist. I mean if there are muses why aren’t there un-muses? That would be quite a thing, wouldn’t it? I bet you thought when you found you couldn’t write that there are loads of other things you could do, mountain climb or do voluntary service in Kenya or learn yoga but you don’t do anything, do you? It’s simply thirty years down the gurgler really, isn’t it?’

I said a trifle snippily, which made me feel immediately guilty, ‘You seem to know a lot about it … being unable to write, that is.’

‘Guesswork, empathy only, I’m glad to say. No, I’ve always been particularly fecund in the writing department. Can’t bloody stop that’s more my problem.’

‘Well, that is nice,’ I said. ‘For me it’s still painfully slow, only the themes are sketched in, the detailed work is still to come … and I don’t … there doesn’t feel like there is much time. I don’t know … how much time I have left to finish it.’

He laughed so much he spat clafoutie across the room. ‘Oh fuck off, Hillary. You are one very chipper old man. Don’t try and play the “look at me, I’m a sad old man approaching death” card just yet.’

True. You might have thought that I would at least get on with the villagers of my own age, reminiscing about the war and such and such but I seemed to inflame my contemporaries even more than I annoyed the younger set. My major crime with the senior crowd was that there was nothing wrong with me. While they aged and shrank and stiffened up and died around me, while remorseless diseases left them crapping in plastic bags and rolling around on ignominious little electric carts, I stayed more or less the same. Fit and healthy and spry; slightly greyer, that is all. I sometimes wondered if somehow the suspension of my output had frozen me at the age I was when I left London. I wondered if when I started writing again I would truly start to age and become subject to all the terrible infirmities. It was a price I would happily pay.

 

It occurs to me that you might have the idea that my poem, my opus, was no good. This had been my worry too, was it just a longer drawn out version of the delusions I had had before? There was only one person I still knew whose opinion I could trust: Paul Caspari, my old publisher, father of the late Blink. Though now ninety years old he was still functional. Like me he had been in a kind of suspension and it was the death of his son that had liberated him, giving him again a seat on the board of Caspari and Millipede, now independent once more after being bought and sold a hundred times, back in the building they had occupied thirty years ago, with the same name after a hundred aliases and the same letterhead after fifty corporate re-designs. What had been the point of all that upset if it only brought them back to the same place? What was the point of driving me mad?

After I sent him such fragments as existed of my poem, plus my plans for the rest, he replied in a letter almost by return of post.

 

Dear Hillary,

How marvellous to hear from you after all this time and to learn that you have begun to write seriously again. My pleasure at this news turned to extreme excitement when I read the opening stanzas and projected plan of your great poem. I do not want to prevaricate in any way: I think you are working on a masterpiece. You will, with this completed poem, claim your place at the forefront of twentieth century poetry. Indeed, you will stake a claim to be regarded as one of the greats of the twenty-first century also. Janus-like your work looks back to our great tradition and also forward with the yet untried face of the future of poetry in English. I do not know if I would immediately have recognised the work as yours as you seem to cloak your individual personality behind a new voice. This voice you are employing strikes me as absolutely right: so far from mediating between the poet and his experience, it serves instead as a way of lifting that experience to a new power. By means of it each item of sensuously registered and remembered experience becomes, whilst keeping its singular integrity, a sign and manifestation of an energy abroad in the waking world.

How we need this energy and vision now!

I have always thought of you as one of the most under-rated poets of recent times: how wonderful to have this opinion vindicated in what will be far and away your most important contribution to literature.

If I can help in any way with comments or discussions I should be honoured to be asked. I do not intend to get in touch with you in the near future as I do not want to distract you for a moment from your great enterprise, but I hope you will have the time to let me have any new verses as you complete them.

We would certainly be happy and honoured to publish your piece, perhaps also a re-issue of your older pieces . .

That would have to wait though. The day after my phone conversation with the Million Pound Poet I rode my Honda Melody to the railway station at Banbury and parked it in the motorcycle bay, squeezing it between a 900cc Triumph Speed Triple and a 200mph Yamaha Yakabuza. I went up to the ticket booth and said to the man behind the plexiglass, as I would have said a long time ago, on the last occasion when I went up to town, ‘I’d like a first class return to London, please.’

Without expression he printed out the ticket in a machine and slid it under the window at me. ‘That’ll be one hundred and seventy-five pounds, please,’ he said.

‘How much?’ I gasped.

‘One hundred and seventy-five pounds, please. Standard first class return, I’m surprised you asked for it. Nobody buys them any more. See, what you should have bought was an Off Peak City Saver or perhaps a Multi Zone Access Pack.’

‘I’m terribly sorry but I don’t have a hundred and seventy-five pounds with me.’

He didn’t seem surprised. ‘No, well there aren’t any first class seats on the train anyway.

He tore the ticket up and printed Out another. ‘Senior Citizen’s Standard Class Fast-track Rail Rover? Twenty-two pounds?’

‘I’ll take it,’ I said.

A train came in fifteen minutes later. When I had first come to the country I would still make the occasional disastrous trip back up to town. Then the trains were a uniform blue and grey, with the gruesome BR logo on the side. Now they weren’t a uniform anything, seeming to be composed of the rolling stock of five different companies from a couple of different countries. Nevertheless I boarded with no trouble and found a seat. We gibbered our way south at only about half the pace I remembered from thirty years ago.

Our train snailed into the suburbs of London and the tracks spread out until they ran like silver streams on each side of us. In a meshed compound I saw Eurostar trains racked side by side, like a display of some imagined near future in a science museum. After that, as if in deliberate contrast, we came upon a district of early Victorian terraces, each backyard a bomb atrocity of disinterred, unidentifiable shards of wood, plastic, metal and decaying vegetable matter. Next there was a sky-darkening twist of concrete flyovers serpenting and intertwining above us, London underground tube stations now mixing with the suburban lines. Suddenly our train shook to a halt, waited for a few minutes throbbing quietly to itself, then crept on even more slowly. Out of the window I saw on the farthest track to us a whole train lying on its side, flame and black smoke only just starting to flick and lick out of the rends in its torn lemon-yellow metal. Several bodies hung from the cracked window frames. One carriage was still the right way up and entirely intact: on the inside passengers beat with their fists on the window glass, mouthing desperate pleas at us as we slid by. In the far, far distance there was the wail of fire engines stuck in unyielding traffic.

A man in a suit with his feet up on the seats opposite me glanced at the wreck, took out his mobile phone and dialled. ‘Hi, it’s me,’ he said, ‘yeah, if you’re thinking of coming into town today I’d take the car, there’s a Hyundai Cotswold Turbo gone off at Larkmead Junction … Ump … coupla or five dead at least, I’d say. Yeah, alright, see you this evening … Bye.’

 

The grand London terminus that I remembered was now a shopping mall with a big roof and trains in one self-effacing corner. Bumped and swerving I walked out into the shriek of traffic.

Unlike the trains, the bus that I caught was exactly the same as it would have been thirty years ago, apart from the price of the fare, that is.

London did not seem so much changed, I suppose if you watch a lot of television you are kept up with the metamorphoses in the capital, and anyway we’ve got a Starbucks in Banbury now.

I found the retro hat shop in Berwick Street Market easily enough, the pattern of the streets had not changed at all. It was called Girl/Boy/Whatever and apart from hats of the past it seemed to sell fake fur-covered hand cuffs, whips and patent leather bikinis for men and women. I went inside.

Behind the counter was a most lovely girl of perhaps thirty years of age. She wore a transparent muslin shirt and tight black leather shorts. A y-shaped chain was connected to each of her breasts by rings through her nipples, the slender chain joined above the rib cage before disappearing underneath the waist band of her shorts presumably to end between her legs.

Yet despite the way she was dressed and despite the scowl on her face, somehow her decency shone out of her, somehow I was certain here was a big kind girl, clearly a kind girl, an honest girl. In a previous age, I reflected, she might have been a servant in a big house or a stenographer riding the tram to work in a cheap two-piece suit and cloche hat. Now she was serving in a shop in Soho with a chain clipped to her cunt.

I approached the counter. I suppose I must have presented an odd sight in that shop: several of the items I was wearing had been present at the fateful meeting with Blink all those years ago. The silver cufflinks from Aspreys, the cashmere navy-blue overcoat, my father’s old Smiths watch. Not present at that lunch in the past were the white Egyptian cotton shirt from Turnbull and Asser, the dark-blue silk tie, the white crepe de Chine monogrammed handkerchief, or the forty-five-year-old double-breasted pin-stripe suit, teamed with a pair of black brogues that I had bought from Shoe Express in Northampton the year before for nineteen pounds and ninety-nine pence. In deference to the fact that we were now in the twenty-first century I had decided not to wear a hat.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to the serving girl, ‘I was wondering whether you have a grey Mau Mau hat in stock?’

‘Mau Mau?’ she said. ‘Mau Mau. They haven’t made those for years. We do get a few in but not at the moment.’

‘Oh,’ I said, disappointment settling on me, ‘I was hoping you’d have one, I’ve a… friend who’s desperate. I don’t know what to do. Can you perhaps … um suggest another retro hat shop?’

She looked a little concerned at my agitation but replied, ‘I can’t fink of another place, no.’

‘I don’t know what to do, I live in a little village in Northamptonshire, this is the first time I’ve come up to town in decades …’

‘Sorry.’

As she raised her arms in a shrug the sleeves of her muslin top fell back to the elbow. I saw that almost the whole length of both her arms were covered in distinctive small puncture marks and longer red weals. Some of the cuts were old and almost shadows but others, around her wrists especially, were fresh and deep and rimmed with dried blood. I recognised the wounds immediately, they were familiar to me.

‘Those marks on your arms,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’ she replied looking sullenly at me with lowered eyes, instinctively tugging on the thin transparent material of her sleeve to cover the scars. I dropped my voice to show that I understood the situation she was in, and looked her directly in the face.

‘You’ve …’ I paused, ‘you’ve … got a cat haven’t you?’

She looked embarrassed for a second then spoke in a smaller voice.

‘Yeah,’ she said again, trying to remain cool but the light of enthusiasm fired up in her brown eyes.

‘What’s its name?’ I asked.

‘He’s called Adrian,’ she said, excited now, speaking quickly, her voice full of remembered love. ‘He’s got this squeaky toy on a string that he likes to play with, he likes me to dangle it over him but sometimes he gets carried away and claws my arm … and, well, sometimes he claws my arm because he’s hungry and sometimes he just claws my arm because he wants to. It’s their nature, though, isn’t it? You got a cat?’

‘Not now. In my time, many, yes.’ I sighed and was silent for a second before continuing. ‘It’s one of the terrible sadnesses of ageing, how many of them you outlive; in the end it becomes too hard. They have such short lives, while ours seem so long, it’s like having a succession of children with rare diseases that you know are going to polish them off in ten, fifteen years.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but what about the pleasure they give, the companionship, the company, simply having another heartbeat about the house.’

‘Oh I know, I know and I miss it terribly. But over the years losing each cat becomes harder and harder. It’s a sort of cumulative thing and finally there comes a time when one particular cat dies and you realise that all the pleasure they have given you does not compensate for the terrible pain their death causes. You realise that, bleak and miserable as it may be, you are still going to be marginally better off without another cat — you will have no pleasure but at least you won’t suffer.’

Though I meant all that I was saying there was also an element of calculation in it. I knew nobody else in London, or anywhere else for that matter, who might be familiar with the retro hat world and also … I don’t know what I thought I was doing flirting with a girl forty years younger than me, but I was. I suppose it was something to do with what the Million Pound Poet had told me about him living with two women. If he could do that why couldn’t I at least flirt with a young attractive woman? Anything seemed possible. Actually picking her up, of course, that didn’t really seem possible. After all what I would do with her once I had picked her up?

‘Oh you know, better to have loved and lost and all that …’ she said, idly flicking at the silver ring that went through her navel and via which the chain ran on its way to the heart of darkness.

‘Not after you’ve lost the fifteenth pet …’ I said. ‘I’ve measured out my life in Pollies and Princes and Bingos …

‘T.S. Eliot, innit?’

‘Sort of.’

‘He wrote a lot of poems about cats, didn’t he?’

‘Yes indeed, though that was my feline adaptation of “The Waste Land”. Do you like poetry?’ I asked her.

‘Only if it’s about cats.’

‘Um.’

‘No, I’m only joking with you. I like some stuff from like the last hundred years. Owen, Auden, MacNeice, Betjeman, John Hegley. Before that I don’t get it.’

I hadn’t expected any mention of me but it was still depressing when I didn’t get it. I said, ‘There’s poems about cats before then. Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes” springs to mind.’

She thought about it. ‘Nawww. Sounds depressing.’ Then she said, ‘Look do you really, really have to have a Mau Mau hat?’

I said, ‘There’s a fellow who feels he really, really has to have one, yes.

‘Well, there’s a stall at Camden Market on Sundays, guy I know who might have one. I could take you there tomorrow if you want … I was going to go up there anyway, so it’s no big thing.’

‘Yes alright, that would be terrific. Where shall we meet?’

‘Outside Camden Town tube at one?’

‘Smashing. What’s your name?’

‘Mercy, Mercy Rush. What’s yours?’ ‘Hillary Wheat.’

‘See you at one tomorrow, Hillary.’

‘See you at one, Mercy.’

 

I felt silly with excitement and had walked half-way back to the station before I came around. I really needed to talk myself down from this ledge of giddiness; she was only being kind, she’d show me the stall then leave me, she’d invite me to a tango club where we’d … stop it, stop it, you silly old man.

Which left me with a choice. What was I going to do for the rest of the day? I supposed I could get back to Northamptonshire tonight easy enough. A newspaper hoarding saved me the trouble of considering that option:

‘Horrendous Rail Crash, Services Disrupted’, it shouted with glee. So I was stuck up in town on a Saturday evening.

Saturday evening has always seemed to me to be the most melancholy time to be alone in a strange town. Everybody else seems to be going home to have a bath before they attend huge dinners with their laughing, adoring families as you stand in the rain outside their houses looking through the windows into their fire-lit happiness.

Fortunately I had kept on paying the fifty pounds a year it took to be a country member of the Kensington Arts Club so I had a bed for the night and somewhere to eat my dinner at the large round table they kept for members who were dining on their own. I was glad to see that the Kensington Arts was still a bastion of disreputable elderly behaviour with no concession made to the modern puritanism. In the bar, hung from floor to ceiling with proper paintings of things and people and animals in gilded frames, everybody smoked and many who were my age or older were dazzlingly drunk. An old man was telling a story about golf which required him to roll about on the floor, a good-looking woman of forty with long dark hair took her top and bra off then danced on the mini grand piano while a man with an eye patch and a Van Dyke beard played jellyroll jazz, another older woman bit me on the arm while I was at the bar getting a drink at pub prices.

 

Say what you like about crack dealers they are not ageist: I was offered rock three times in the twenty minutes I stood outside Camden Town tube station waiting for Mercy. When I had last seen Camden Town it was a district of glum Irish drinking holes, black canals, economy cash butchers, Shirley Conran and Dr Jonathan Miller. Now it was as if all the various young peoples of the world had decided to come to this place in order to wear each other’s clothes and to talk in each other’s languages. Thus I saw what I took to be Nepalese boys in the garb of urban American blacks talking to each other in Spanish, four Japanese girls wearing Andean headgear yabbering to each other in Magreb Arabic, Saree-covered Tolchucks conversing in Cantonese, Malay-speaking Rastafarians, Portuguese-giggling Sikhs, English-speaking Hindu Swedes, Urdu-chattering Nigerian Orthodox Rabbis.

I thought she wasn’t coming, half wanted her not to come; hope is a harder thing to cope with at my age than prostate cancer. At least you’re expecting prostate cancer.

Then she was in front of me, smiling, better, more beautiful by far than I remembered her. I’d forgotten how tall she was, taller than me by nearly a foot. I felt ridiculous.

‘Hiya,’ she said. ‘Sorry I’m a bit late. Shall we find this stall then?’ She linked her arm through mine and steered me through the crowds. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said. ‘I have to warn you about this hat stall … and women there’s something about a hat stall that sends women into erotic spasms. I don’t know what it is. This bloke who runs the stall, he operates it at a loss simply because of the pussy he gets. Here check it.’

We had come to a Soweto of stalls crammed just before the bridge that spanned the old Grand Union Canal. One of those that abutted the street was the hat stall and as Mercy had warned, several women stood writhing beside it as they tried on each hat and looked at themselves in the mirror. One teenage Finn unconsciously rubbed her groin against a corner of the table. When the man who ran the stall reached out and adjusted their hats, tilting them one way or the other, visible shivers ran through the women and they let out low moans of ecstasy. Mercy led me over to the stall. ‘Hiya, Guy,’ she said to the man behind it, then leant across the hats and kissed him on the lips. An audible growling rose from the other women.

To regain the focus one stuck a Cornish fisherman’s cap, done in patent leather with spikes sticking out of it, on her head and querulously whined, ‘Guy, Guy, does this suit me, would it go with a rubber mini-skirt, Guy? And a red leather bustier, would it, Guy, would it?’

But Guy was gazing steadily at Mercy, peripherally conscious of the other woman but deliberately ignoring her. ‘Hi, Mercy,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

‘Oh you know,’ she replied then she turned to me. ‘Guy, this is Hillary, he’s desperate to find a grey Mau Mau hat, mid-90s I’d say, you got one?’

I shook hands with Guy who said, looking me up and down, ‘It won’t go with that Savile Row suit, homeboy.’

‘It’s for a friend,’ I replied.

‘Right.’

He bent down under the table and emerged some seconds later with a hat identical, as far as I could tell, to the one the Million Pound Poet had been wearing. ‘Here we are, I only bought this a couple of days ago off some bloke in the Midlands. They’re quite a big collectors’ item, you know, early Nineties Mau Mau hats. It’ll cost you sixty quid.’

‘Oh come on, Guy!’ Mercy said. ‘He can’t afford that. Sixty squid for a hat.’

For an instant a look of absolute hatred passed across Guy’s face. ‘I’ve done you enough…’ he began to say, then the fight went out of him. ‘OK, thirty, that’s what I paid for it.’

‘You’re a doll,’ said Mercy and leant across the stall again, crushing several chapeaux as she hugged him and licked his ear. I paid over the thirty pounds, Mercy flattened some more stock saying goodbye to Guy, then she took my arm again and we walked off as the tide of clamouring womanhood closed in around him.

When you have fought bush warfare you develop an instinct for malevolent eyes and I could feel Guy staring after us with baking anger, which in turn made me feel inordinately pleased that I was taking her away from him.

‘You didn’t say you were a poet,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘So I read one of your poems last night in an anthology.’

‘Which one?’

‘“The Cat’s Pyjamas” .’

I said, ‘Are you still a poet if you haven’t written anything for thirty years?’

‘I guess … if you haven’t done anything else. Have you done anything else?’

‘Not a thing,’ I said and couldn’t help a sigh escaping from me, like a lilo being sat on by a fat man.

‘How sad,’ she sounded genuinely upset. ‘So you’ve written nothing for thirty years? And you’re not going to start again or anything? You’ve not started again?’

I felt a strange reluctance to talk about whether I was writing again or not, on that day it seemed a distant and infinitely tedious thing. Apart from anything else her sympathy had given me a tingle in my groin that I wanted more of.

‘If you don’t mind I’d rather not talk about it,’ I said in a sad voice.

‘Sure, no problem, it’s off the agenda.’ She considered for a moment. ‘You want to go and get some lunch?’

‘Certainly,’ I replied. ‘Where?’

‘I dunno …’ We were in a backstreet, uncertainty seemed to grip her. ‘If you don’t want lunch, maybe if you want to get the train home instead …’

It was slipping away, if I didn’t find a place for lunch it would end there. Looking desperately around I suddenly saw a familiar doorway. It was the same basement place Blink had taken me to all those years ago. ‘Here’s a good place,’ I blabbed, ‘they do good food here.’ Before she could speak I steered her through the doorway and down the stairs.

For those in the basement the First World War was over and it had been won by Kenyan Asians.

As soon as I stepped into the dining room the smells of Rahman’s Café in Nairobi forty-seven years ago were all around me. We sat down at a plain pine table, stainless steel water jug and cups already present, a young man brought us plastic-covered menus.

‘What sort of food is this?’ she asked.

‘They’re Asians from Kenya.’

‘Doesn’t that make them Africans then?’

‘Not as far as the Africans were concerned.’

‘Will you order for me? I’m a vegetarian. I don’t eat meat or fish.’

‘I’m sure it won’t be a problem.’

At Rahman’s the others in my regiment had ordered hideous beef dinners of roast camel and gravy that had come from a tree, boiled puddings composed of various naturally occurring poisons and ‘fried breakfast meats with a egg’, which was a crocodile mother-and-child reunion. I on the other hand had ostentatiously ordered in Swahili: mogo, otherwise known as cassava, served with a tamarind chutney, brinjal curry, karahi karela, tarka dhal and rotis to show my cosmopolitanism. I ordered the same now, again in Swahili and I was twenty-five again.

Mercy said, ‘Can I tell you what I did last night?’

‘Of course.’

 

Mercy locked the shop up at six and collected her Piaggio Velocoraptor 125cc scooter from the motorbike bay in Great Marlborough Street, then she rode to a house in Hackney, East London, parked over the road and stood watching the doorway of the house, hidden in the entrance of a derelict shop directly opposite. About an hour and a half later a man came out of the house accompanied by a girl of about twenty-five. The man looked a little older than the girl, was good-looking and fit. The couple paused on the step to kiss, the man sliding his hands down the back of the girl’s jeans. They broke apart enough to walk twined up in each other to the man’s gas engineers’ van parked at the pavement. They then drove off.

Mercy waited for fifteen minutes then went across to the house and opened the front door with a key. Once in the hall she let herself into the ground-floor flat, inside she did not turn on a light but instead felt her way along to the living room which was lit by the orange frazzle of a streetlamp in the road outside.

The room was tastefully furnished with chrome and leather furniture, framed movie posters on the walls and racks and racks of vinyl records in bleached wood cabinets. On a table there was a turntable and amplifier, the British-made sort that only have one on/off switch and a simple big volume knob yet cost several thousand pounds to buy. Mercy filled a kettle from a tap in the kitchen then returned to the living room and poured tepid water down the back of the amplifier, she opened a tin of cream of mushroom soup and tipped that over the turntable. In the bedroom a number of Paul Smith suits were hanging in a closet; Mercy decanted the contents of several cans of Thai Style Vegetables into the pockets of these suits then dribbled Diet Coke down their inner linings. After that she let herself out, got on her scooter and rode home.

Round about eleven o’clock she was sitting on her couch flipping through an anthology of twentieth-century poetry when the phone rang.

‘Hello, Kitten,’ said a man’s voice.

‘Hello, Dad,’ she said, ‘how’s it going?’

‘Fucking terrible! Your mad cow of a stepmother’s broken into my place again and vandalised all my fucking stuff!’

‘How do you know it was her?’

‘Who else would it fucking be? Whoever did it had a key, so that pretty much narrows it down.’

‘Does it? How many hundred women out there have your key?’

‘Not that many.

‘Really? What did she do anyway?’

‘Poured soup all over my Nazuku.’

‘Painful.’

‘Don’t take the piss, you know you’re the only one I can talk to, Kitten, about this stuff.’

‘Yeah, sorry … So how’s everything going with the new one, what’s her name, Apricot?’

‘Oh yeah, she’s great. I think she could definitely be your new mum. Dirty little baggage as well, she sucked me off at the traffic lights in my van last night . .

‘Wow …’

‘Yeah, she’s brilliant. We’re going to a leather fetish all-nighter in a minute, up at The Cross, you wanna come?’

‘Naww, I fink I’m staying in tonight.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘OK, see ya, Kitten.’

‘Bye, Dad.’

Then Mercy said to me, ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Of course.

‘Can I come and visit you in the country? Next weekend? I’m sick of this town.’

‘Of course you can.

After that we talked about cats and where she went to school and things like that, then it seemed the natural time to part since there was going to be next weekend.

Outside in the street, Great, well then I’ll see you next weekend.’ She kissed me on the lips and hugged me, then stood back and I walked to the tube station.

 

I tried to get back to working on my poem when I returned to Lyttleton Strachey but my mind would not fix on it, I could think of little else other than Mercy’s upcoming visit.

I was also waiting for Porlock to phone about his hat but he didn’t and I didn’t have a phone number or an address for him which preyed on my mind as well. What I thought about most was how I would entertain Mercy over the coming weekend. One thing I intended to do was to impress her with a cornucopia of vegetables. I had my own extensive vegetable patch at the top of my field, but I had been neglecting it recently. I needed to get it in good order if it was going to produce a cornucopia of vegetables. Never mind, I had an established asparagus bed so I would be able to cut asparagus for our meals, also I could harvest early lettuce, broccoli and radishes, leeks and spring cabbages, winter cauliflower and winter spinach. Plus turnip tops, don’t forget turnip tops.

My house had come with a quarter-acre paddock across the lane running between the church graveyard and one of Sam’s fields with some of his concentration-camp sheds in it. Sam had made numerous attempts to get his hands on this triangle of land including hiring some bogus army officers who tried to requisition it for a supposed firing range. My vegetable patch was at the far end of this paddock.

On the Wednesday of the week before Mercy came I was in the field planting out late summer cabbages and purple-sprouting broccoli. Next I was planning to remove any rhubarb flowers, which you have to do as soon as they appear, when I saw Bateman coming up the lane. He waved to me and vaulted the gate into the field. This day Bateman was wearing an off-the-shoulder, knee-length Laura Ashley dress, black Lewis Leathers motorbike jacket and army boots with knee-length black socks. ‘Hey, Professor!’ he shouted to me. I put my trowel down, knowing I had finished gardening for some time. Bateman had come for a talk.

He liked talking to me, more or less always about the same thing. People I had killed. I had pointed out on more than one occasion that the people I had killed had been black people such as himself but he didn’t care, he said he was Antiguan not African so it didn’t matter.

‘Hello, Bateman,’ I said. He sprawled down on the grass next to me, his skirt riding up over his thumping muscled black thighs.

‘Professor … I just thinkin’ I’d come over an’ give you a chance to do some of your war reminiscin’ .

I said, ‘I don’t particularly want to do any reminiscing about my war. I never have.’

‘Course you do, all you old ones love the war reminiscin’. Goin’ on about Churchill an’ Hitler an’ Elvis an’ all that.’

‘Tell the truth, you like hearing about it.’

‘No way, man, I’m being social servicin’ is all …’ he tried a pause but couldn’t hold it, his impatience getting in the way, ‘… so get on with it.’

‘Oh alright.’ I gave in as I always did. ‘What you have to remember about Kenya,’ I said, ‘was that while the rest of the British Empire was settled by those from all classes, more of those in Kenya came from the upper classes. They were famous before the war for the life they led.’

Eagerly he asked, ‘What sort of life?’

‘Drink, fast cars, hunting, extra-marital affairs, sexual perversion.

‘Brilliant … and nice weather too, innit?’

‘Yes and nice weather too. I don’t know why but somehow I always had the feeling the way the settlers carried on led to the Mau Mau uprising, after all it didn’t happen like that anywhere else in Africa, sort of brought it on themselves, a price to pay for their decadence …’

‘Why, they was just enjoyin’ theirselves.’

‘Maybe. The whole thing’s almost forgotten about now … odd, really, when you think about it. The Mau Mau starts out as a bloody insurrection and ends up as a hat.’

‘A hat, what about a hat?’

‘Nothing, sorry … You should have seen the settlers’ houses, ridiculous Cheshire wooden villas they were, set in acres of flame trees. In 1953 the Africans rose up. They called themselves the Mau Mau. I remember in my first week there, we were called to a farm. A family named Barlow … the son was in the yard … they’d hacked him with pangas …’

‘That’s like a machete, right?’

‘Right, yes, like a machete. He glistened, the son … like that sauce they put on spare ribs at the Chinese takeaway … purple and deep red … His parents were in the house … all over the house. And the thing was really that they’d got the wrong people, if that was their concern. Mrs Barlow was pregnant, ran a clinic for the Kikkuyu women and children, Mr Barlow was a model employer, had no intention of evicting the small native farmers which had started the whole thing … the son spoke Kikkuyu, the family had built lovely cottages for their workers. On the next farm over was a complete bastard called Magruder, he’d taken many a black woman and raped them, drove them all off his land, got very rich. They never touched him. He’s still there now. I think he’s in the government.’

‘Them’s the breaks.’

‘I don’t know. It wasn’t like the Mau Mau didn’t know what the Barlows were like, because we found out that it was their head boy who had organised the whole thing, he’d been with the Barlows twenty years, they’d paid for his son to go to university in Leeds. But all over, domestic servants were at the front of it all. You know Graham Greene was Out there at that time, we used to have a drink together sometimes at Rahman’s and he said that it was as if Jeeves had taken to the Jungle. Even worse, Jeeves had taken a blood oath to kill Bertie Wooster.’ I could see Bateman was wondering who and what I was talking about.

‘I couldn’t hold the chaps back. My sergeant shot the head boy and his wife and his son … A lot of that sort of thing went on, I should really have put them all on a charge but that would have made me terribly unpopular with my men.

‘They would’ve fragged ya like they did in Vietnam.’

‘I’m not sure there’s a lot of that in the British army. There was a terrible panic amongst the white settlers but you know during the whole thing only thirty-two whites died; as somebody said, that’s fewer than the number of Europeans killed in traffic accidents in Nairobi during the emergency. We, on the other hand, the settlers and the British army and our loyal native police, killed thousands of Kenyans and they, the Mau Mau, killed thousands of each other.’

Bateman, becoming bored with my historical contextualising, steered me towards hardware: he loved talking about guns and he bought all those rap records where gangstas sang lovingly about their ‘nines’. ‘Course you still had the old .303 Lee Enfield rifles then, didn’t you? And the 9mm sten guns and the .303 Bren guns for squad support. And they had …?’

‘Apart from what little they stole off the native police, the Mau Mau made their guns themselves from odd bits of iron piping, door bolts, rubber bands and bits of wire. Often, of course, these guns would blow up in their faces. I only once was in a thing you could call a firefight…’

‘You were in a firefight? Wow I bet a firefight separates the men from the boys,’ said Bateman.

‘A firefight certainly separates the men from their heads,’ I said.

‘Wow, you saw a guy’s head shot off?’

‘Not literally, I was being poetic. A lot of the fellows thought they’d shot a whole load of the Mau Mau but when we looked they’d all shot themselves: when your gun blows up the injuries are obviously facial.’ Then an idea came to me.

‘Bateman, I was wondering if you and Suki would like to come to my house for dinner on Saturday night, I’m … er, having a young friend to stay from London and erm … well, if you’d like to come to dinner—’

‘Sure, man, why not? What time?’

‘Eight?’

‘Great, give me a chance to wear my new dress.’

 

I didn’t want to appear as if I was trying too hard, as if I had thought of nothing else except her visit the whole six days, so I wore an old Donegal tweed sports jacket, with one of the original Pringle pullovers underneath, brown moleskin trousers, a good leather belt, soft rust-coloured cotton shirt, a dark-green knitted tie, Argyle socks, and my second-best dark-brown Lobb brogues.

I waited with my Honda Melody in the car park of Banbury Station. She was one of the first out from the three o’clock London train with her bouncing walk that made her black hair bob up and down. She had on a black leather jacket, turquoise T-shirt with a sparkling abstract design on the chest, and tight blue faded Wrangler jeans. Over her shoulders she had a backpack shaped like a pair of silver angel’s wings and on her arm she had brought her own crash helmet from London.

Angel’s wings not being the most space-efficient shape for a backpack she had had to put some of her spare clothes in the crash helmet. A lot of the ease we had with each other the weekend before had evaporated for the moment, still she kissed me quickly on the lips and I tried not to look as she transferred lacy red silk bra and pants underwear from her crash helmet into the little plastic box on the back of my scooter. Then we puffed the nine miles to Lyttleton Strachey, her arms wrapped tight around me, the brave little machine wheezing under the weight of two people for the first time since I had owned it.

I had washed all the bed linen in the spare room and re-made the single bed, I had had to leave the windows open for three days to drive out the musty unused smell. When I had first come to this place I had still entertained ideas of friends coming out to stay with me. I had thought Larkin might come. Though I didn’t know him that well we corresponded quite regularly and I think we were friends. For example in our letters we would use forbidden words as close friends do, words unusable even forty years ago, like ‘coon’ and ‘sambo’:

I thought we were doing this in a spirit of flaunting, between friends, the rules of liberal decency but now, in retrospect, I am not so sure about Larkin. I think he might have meant it. Anyway he never came.

At the end of our ride Mercy put her underwear back in the crash helmet and I showed her up to the spare room and told her where the bathroom was.

 

All the day before I had been cleaning my little house, I polished the good Fifties furniture with real wax furniture polish, silicon-based sprays like Mr Sheen are no good for fine furniture. What I was proudest of in my house were the paintings. I had known most of the important artists of the post-war period; this had taken no effort on my part, one simply bumped into them, in those days there simply weren’t that many places to go. By and by most everybody would come to the Stork Club, the Kensington Arts or The Mirabelle, in the other party would be someone from school or university or the army and an introduction would be made. In the dining room was a small Patrick Caulfield, in the living room I had several Henry Moore drawings and, in pride of place over the mantelpiece, a small Graham Sutherland oil painting. These I ran over with a feather duster and wiped the frames with a fine cloth slightly dampened, careful not to touch the precious surface of the paintings.

And all that morning I had been cooking and baking. Since all but me were vegetarians I had made a dinner of cream of spinach soup with steamed turnip tops, broccoli quiche, asparagus risotto, cauliflower cheese and a mixed salad. To drink I had got Sam to buy me two bottles of Bordeaux and two bottles of Sancerre from D’agneau et Fils in the Place Gambetta, Calais.

Bateman brought round a litre bottle of vodka he had shoplifted from the off licence in Middleton Cheney plus a gift for Mercy: to supplement his dole money Suki and he made small figures from bits of wire, nuts and bolts that they then covered in a black rubbery coating and which they sold, quite successfully, from a stall in the market at Northampton. They gave Mercy the figure of a cat arching its back and spitting, with its fur sticking up on end. ‘Wow,’ she exclaimed looking at it from every angle, ‘this is brilliant, just like my Adrian. I’ll put it on the mantelpiece in front of that painting, so I can look at it while we talk.’

‘So, Mercy,’ said Suki, ‘how do you like our village?’

‘Well, I haven’t seen much of it but it seems lovely. Really pretty and quiet and that.’

Said Bateman, ‘You won’t see anybody all day in the outside and all the nature and that around on the hills, trees and so on, makes you feel really calm and centred, know what I mean?’

‘Cows and such.’

Mercy said, ‘London’s so cold, I bet everybody’s really friendly here.’

‘Oh yeah we all look out for each other, everybody knows what’s goin’ on with everybody else.’

‘And safe.’

‘You don’t need to lock your door.’

‘Well you do, but if you didn’t you’d probably be OK if it was only for a couple of hours.’

After dinner we walked through the silent village to the noisy pub. The Young Farmers were holding a disco in the village hall next door, the DJ was playing an old Nineties hip-hop tune ‘Like A Playa’ by L.A. Gangz, the Notorious B.I.G. Remix I thought. On the door were stationed three or four beefy farmers’ sons and daughters; they kept baseball bats tucked behind the door jamb but in easy reach just in case any drugged-up gangs came out from the estates of Daventry or Northampton. The beefy boys rather hoped they would come out, cherishing the opportunity to break a few working-class skulls. The same old story of town versus country, aristocrat versus prole, the General Strike of 1926 played out to the soundtrack of DaCompton Ghettoz.

Suddenly one of the farmers’ boys on the door gave a violent jerk then fell to the ground, all life gone from his body. His fellows gathered round, three or four trying to dial the emergency services on their mobiles at the same time and jamming the signal. The ambulance would take an hour to get here anyway, it being Saturday night and them all being in play and the nearest available being in the next county but one.

‘What’s going on?’ I said to Bateman.

‘Ah somebody’s been pushing semi-fatal smack in Northampton, the scientists are baffled, they don’t know what’s wrong with it, possibly something to do with anthrax they ain’t sure … be that he took I spect.’

The car park of the pub was full of BMWs and Audis, Range Rovers and Mercedes; we had to slip in single file between them to get to the front door, the mud on their sides smearing our clothes.

Inside it was if all the noise that had been banned from the rest of the village was let loose in here.

The lads were at the bar, Marty Spen, Paul Crouch, Miles Godmanchester, Ronny Raul. I don’t know why in my mind I called them ‘The Lads’, they are all middle-aged men, all involved in some way or other, as everybody seemed to be in the village, in making the world a worse place.

As I’ve said before Miles Godmanchester was employed at Daventry Life Sciences, mutilating animals for the cosmetics industry, though I had heard him maintain at the bar in the pub that his work had saved the lives of many ‘sick little kiddies’. Marty Spen was supposed to keep it quiet but he was an engineer for a French arms firm whose UK base was in a long gold building, cloistered in a boskey, wooded valley to the east of Oxford. Their main product was the ‘Bunuel’ ground-to-air missile. Marty Spen was always off to visit some dreadful regime, Turkey or Indonesia, to help them more efficiently strafe their own populace. Such peregrination was not unusual; in any village pub round this way half the customers would be just back from the other side of the globe and half had never been anywhere at all and would need hypnotherapy before they even considered visiting nearby Northampton. And you couldn’t guess which was which either. Some yokel straight out of Thomas Hardy might be heard to say in the pub, ‘Oiv jarst been instarllin an ethernet modarl intranet system in that thar Yokahama, I bought I a DV camera at the airport …’ Marty Spen and his wife spent their holidays every year in Saudi Arabia, guests of a grateful government. Paul Crouch had something to do with tobacco promoting Formula One cars and Ronny Raul was a food scientist at US Abstract Foods Corporation on the Banbury ring road, whose factory would fill the air for miles around with the smell of whatever they were concocting that day, nutmeg and cinnamon, coffee and cardamon, saffron and chocolate, the smells of the Damascus souk amongst the tilting roadsigns and squashed-flat rabbit corpses of the A316.

The concentric rings of a sexquake ran through the lads as Mercy came through the door into the pub, then a following after-shock of perplexity when it was clear that she was with me. The other three sat down at a table and I went up to the bar to order drinks.

Miles Godmanchester said, ‘Hello, Hillary, who’s this? Your granddaughter, is it?’

I just smiled a silly smile and ordered drinks.

‘A friend from London…’ I eventually said.

‘You’re a quiet one, it’s gotta be said.’

‘Fucking gorgeous,’ said Marty Spen.

‘Blinder,’ from Paul Crouch.

‘Spectacular tits,’ said Ronny Raul.

On my way back to the table I sensed the men looking at me and felt ridiculous pride.

 

After the pub Bateman and Suki came back to my house and finished off the bottle of vodka so that Mercy and I didn’t go up to bed till 3 a.m. In the doorway of my room she said, ‘I think I’m falling in love with you a little bit.’

I could do nothing except emit a foolish little giggle. She put her arms round me and bent down to kiss me, her tongue in my mouth; I could feel the down on her upper lip. Then she pulled her mouth away and put her head on my shoulder. This gave me a good view of a Bridget Riley etching that I had stopped noticing was there years ago and which deserved a better spot than the upstairs landing. Its migraine swirls seemed appropriate to the moment. She went on, ‘You’ll understand if we don’t … you know, sleep together right now, though, won’t you? I’ve got to get my head straight about a few things.’

‘Of course I understand,’ I said.

Then she went to bed.

 

The next day I felt quite ill: I had had no reason to stay up late in a long while and even when I went to bed I hadn’t slept very well. By the time I got down to the kitchen it was nearly eleven o’clock. Mercy had the Roberts radio atop the window sill switched on, tuned to MidCounty Melody FM, soft rock trickling like treacle out of its speaker.

We went for a walk together along the bridleways. I showed her where the railways used to run, where the old fishponds and rabbit warrens were, named the few kinds of trees and the one wayside flower the chemicals had left behind.

She thought it was all wonderful. She said, ‘Hillary?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s quite a big thing.’

‘Go on.’

‘Can I come and stay here with you for a bit? I’ve really got to get out of London, it’s doing my head in.

My heart leapt though I was not sure with what emotion exactly. However I said quickly enough, ‘Of course you can.

When we got back to my house Bateman was standing by my front door. He waved a ziplock bag at us. ‘I got dis good scag in Banbury dis mornin, you wanna try some?’

‘Sure,’ said Mercy hurrying inside with an eager smile on her face. Turning to me she said, ‘Fuck, the country really is brilliant, isn’t it?’

We went into the living room, Mercy and Bateman sitting side by side on the couch while I took the armchair; we were like two kids and their dad. Bateman took a roll of tinfoil from his pocket, he tore off a piece and sprinkled some of the heroin onto it, then he rolled some more tinfoil into a tight little tube. Heating the drug from beneath with a little plastic lighter, he sucked up the snow-white smoke. ‘You want, Hillary?’ he asked. I said no, so he put some more heroin onto the foil and passed it, the lighter and the tube to Mercy. She put the tube between her lips and drew hungrily on the narcotic fumes.

I wanted to stay as alert as I could, although I was feeling drowsy myself from the effects of my late night: it was nearly four o’clock and time for this week’s omnibus edition of The Job on UK Gold, which I was eager to see as I’d missed a lot of episodes during the week. The reason I admired shows like The Job or the hospital drama Casualty was because although they were hack work, scripts turned out week after week for an audience who didn’t want their intelligence stimulated too much after they’d had their chemical-packed, ready meal dinners, they were good hack work providing the cleansing catharsis of Greek drama.

Once, a few years ago, I tried my hand at writing an episode of Casualty. We were all writers after all. Sitting at my desk day after day I thought I might become a different sort of writer. My idea was that as usual in that show the chemical tanker would leave the depot, its driver complaining of chest pains, the Sea Scouts would set out in their kayaks despite warnings on the radio of bad weather, the bickering couple would begin working on their house not having seen what we had seen, that the power saw with the whirling silver shark-finned blades was faulty and unsafe. We would keep cutting back to these scenes, the tanker on the motorway, the Scouts on the increasingly choppy sea, the couple arguing and slicing. However at the very end of the episode, after fifty-five minutes, the tanker would arrive safely at its destination with no undue incident, the driver suffering from nothing more serious than wind, the leader of the Sea Scouts would decide it might be prudent to seek shelter from the bad weather so they would paddle to a safe bay where they would sit under a tree eating their sandwiches, and the bickering couple would notice that the saw was faulty and would immediately take it to a registered dealer for repair under its warranty. All this time Charlie and the rest of the cast at Holby A & E would sit around drinking tea and saying what a quiet day it was and how they’d like a bit of action and something would happen any second now. Then they’d all go home for an early night.

I got a very nice letter back from the producer’s assistant saying that they didn’t accept unsolicited scripts but she had included a signed photo of the cast.

Bateman and Mercy slowly slid sideways on the couch, their arms lying twisted under them on the cushions, drifting steeply into narcotic dreaming. It felt like a traditional English Sunday afternoon. Everybody in a coma and the TV on.

 

One of the cable TV companies was currently running an advertising campaign: it featured two office workers standing by the water cooler on a Monday morning. One is handsome, tall and confident, the other is shorter, uglier and more nervy. The Nervy one says to the other, ‘I had a fantastic weekend. Went to a club …’ — we then see the club which is crowded and noisy — ‘met a great woman…’ — we see the woman slapping his face — ‘didn’t get home till 3 a.m.’ — we see him walking home alone in the rain. Then he says to the handsome man, ‘What did you do?’ We cut to all the great cable TV programmes this man has watched over the weekend. ‘Oh, just stayed in and watched TV,’ he says and smiles smugly. The tag line of the advert is: ‘A Life Worth Watching.’

The implication is that the handsome man has had a better time by staying in and watching the television. But really it’s the ugly one that you should admire, doggedly ploughing on with going Out into the world, despite it relentlessly coughing great gobs of rejection and hawking them into his face. Brave, brave, ugly, nervy little man.

Most weekends before Mercy came I stayed in and watched television.

 

Bateman went up to London in his van to get her stuff. There was a lot of it. Such as: an exercise bike, a dressmaker’s dummy with the face of Cliff Richard, a hundred pairs of shoes, her Piaggio (which I was looking forward to riding), two inflatable armchairs and, in his travelling basket, Adrian, a furious-looking black tom cat whose continual yowling only stopped when he was let out into the living room and went straight about attacking the moquette of my Hille couch with his claws.

It took so long to get her stuff in that it was ten o’clock by the time we’d finished, which meant that I’d missed a special two-hour episode of The Job when Kurdish terrorists took the whole station hostage and threatened to blow it up. One of the old cast members was certain to die, my money was on kindly old desk sergeant, Ron Task. I had been interested to see how the new prettier cast would work out in their first big two-hourer. I thought they had been slow to bed in: partly it was that their appearance was now so at variance with what real police looked like. They were all young and thin with full heads of hair. There were no fat old men working out their time for their pension and, strangest of all, none of the WPCs were stumpy-calfed lesbians.

 

Mercy would stand at the living-room window every morning and say, ‘It’s so peaceful, I can’t get over how peaceful it is, it’s so peaceful, I can’t get over it,’ then she would go next door to smoke dope with Bateman and Suki if she hadn’t gone to school, the sound of his electric guitar thumping through the walls as I sat in my office sparring with my poem.

Tuesdays and Thursdays she would go with them into Northampton to help with their stall on the market, but then all her stuff stayed behind to represent her and I could hardly get to my study for training shoes.

When she was home Mercy would often walk around the house naked except for her pants.

I went out for longer and longer walks, issuing from paths round the blind backs of villages that I had only ever seen from the lanes, bursting upon unmarked NATO radar stations and on one occasion emerging through a hawthorn hedge onto the eastbound carriageway of the M40 motorway.

With regard to headgear my strong feeling is that felt hats should solely be worn up until Royal Ascot which is held in the third week of June, after which straw is permissible, so, deep in the fields on the Friday afternoon, I was wearing grey flannel trousers, a cream cotton jacket, white cotton shirt with no tie but instead a silk paisley cravat, stout brown walking shoes from Hogg’s of Aberdeen and a fine straw panama hat when I came upon Sam stretching razor-wire fencing across an ancient drovers’ road. I hadn’t seen much of Sam lately so I was pleased to encounter him, though as a lifelong member of the Ramblers’ Association I should really have reproved him for lethally blocking off the footpath; instead I said, ‘Hello, Sam, I didn’t know this was your land.’

‘Oh aye, all around ‘ere, my land.’

‘I see.

‘Not for much longer though, sellin’ it for an ‘ousing development. Three hundred warehouse-style loft apartments for sophisticated rural singles.’

‘Goodness,’ I said, ‘but I heard on the radio the other day that the population is shrinking. Who are these places for?’

‘The government say, the housebuilders say, they need four million nu omes.

‘But who for?’

‘Ah it’s for all these people who’re living by themselves these days, they need a whole apartment to live by themselves in, to wander from room to room, naked, I expect. I ‘spect they’ve lost the knack of gettin’ on with other folk, seeing as they spend all their days at computers, talkin’ to ghosts across the other side of the world. When I was young we all lived together. Generations all together on top of each other. My old gran in the loft, my mum, my dad, brothers and sisters, cousins, lodgers, aunts fallen on hard times, uncles that took a shock and took to their beds never to get up till they died. It were fuckin’ horrible.’

A look crossed his face. ‘Must be like your house these days with all the comm’ and goin’.’

‘I suppose so.

‘No, we don’t see you so much now. An’ how’s that poem of yours that you was tellin’ us about comm’ on?’

‘I can’t seem to get on with it ..

‘No well, I expect you’re having too much fun, with your new friends.’

‘Is that what it is?’

‘I would have thought you’d need to get a move on, though, don’t you? I mean how long have you got left?’

‘In what sense?’

‘In your life sense, might only be a year or two after all, what are you?’

‘Seventy-two.’

‘What’s the average, seventy-six, is it? Then there’s all the stuff that happens, strokes, cancer, even if you survive beyond that, your mind goes, a year or two and I imagine your powers will be waning considerable. There’s not a minute to be lost when you think about it, is there? Time must be running through your fingers like sand. There’s not a minute, not a second to be wasted.’

 

When I got back to my house, out of breath from trying to run some of the way across ploughed fields, my mudsplattered flannels torn from my having unsuccessfully attempted to vault a stile, there was a van parked on my drive, on its side was written ‘Barry Rush, Certified Gas Heating Engineer’.

Mercy was in the kitchen looking tense, trying to grill some toast. She said, ‘Hillary, my dad’s here.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘so I see.’

I went into the living room. Sitting on my couch was a youthful-looking man: it was hard to believe he was Mercy’s father. The young image was compounded by his clothes, he wore a coat from Dexter Wong, black leather Prada trousers and the new Nike cross trainers, his hair was shaved to mask his baldness and his arms were muscled and buffed from gym training. Sitting next to him was a girl of perhaps twenty-five, her clothes were more ordinary, torn Gap jeans and a pale blue T-shirt, her small breasts clearly defined, dark blonde hair in dreadlocks and a ring through the centre of her bottom lip.

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m Hillary Wheat.’ They stood and shook my hand.

‘Barry Rush.’

‘Melon Gabriel.’

‘Please do sit down, is Mercy looking after you?’

‘Yeah, she’s getting us coffee and stuff,’ said her father.

‘Lovely little house you have here,’ said Melon. While Barry spoke in working-class Scottish, her accent had been forged in a barrio bounded by Knightsbridge to the north and Sloane Street to the west, Eaton Square to the south and Grosvenor Place to the east. ‘My brother Rollo has a place over towards Daventry. Fawkley Hall — do you know it?’

‘I’ve been round it.’

‘The Van Dykes are particularly fine, aren’t they?’

‘Indeed. So are you here to stay for the weekend?’

‘Naww. Me and Melon are attending a weekend pony club that’s being held at a stately home over Byfield way. Starts tomorrow morning, so I thought we’d get here early and spend the night with my darling daughter.’

‘Well, yes, of course. You can sleep in the erm .

‘The spare room,’ said Mercy coming in with a tray piled with coffee and burnt toast.

‘Yes, the spare room … You know it’s shaming but I don’t know as much as I should about these country pursuits. Is a pony club some type of point to point?’

Barry and Melon sniggered. Melon took it upon herself to explain in a voice vibrating with a kind of self-regarding excitement. ‘No, Hillary, what happens at a pony club is that all the women there dress up in special leather costumes, bustiers, high-heeled boots and so on, plumed headdresses like you see on horses at funerals, we all have nice swishy tails, the other end of which, of course, are butt plugs, big rubber dicks, which are stuck up our arses. Then we’re leashed to little pony carts and we pull the men around in them. And the men whip us when we don’t go fast enough, somebody might get branded and such and such.’

‘I see.’

Barry chipped in, ‘It’s fantastic and we’ve made so many friends of like-minded individuals at these weekends. As soon as it’s over we can’t wait to get home so we can all get on the e-mail, chatting to each other.’

‘Toast?’ said Mercy, setting the tray down with a crash.

After coffee we showed them up to the spare room. At some point Mercy seemed to have moved all of her substantial amounts of possessions into my bedroom, her underwear and her stuffed toys and her punchbag and her weights. She followed me in there after we’d shown Barry and Melon the bathroom and they’d gone in there together, carrying a coiled length of rubber tubing and locking the door behind them.

Mercy sat on my bed. She said, ‘I’m sorry about putting my things in your bedroom, I don’t know… I didn’t want my dad to think I was sleeping in the spare room.

‘Why not? You are sleeping in the spare room.

‘I know but I didn’t want him to think I was.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t give me a hard time please, Hillary. Just don’t, alright?’

‘I’m sorry, Mercy.’

‘That’s OK.’

 

That evening we all went for a meal in the village pub, the pub which had been called the Royal Oak for three hundred years, which had been called The People’s Princess for three years, and which the landlady had now changed to The Stephen Lawrence. Barry, Melon, Suki, Bateman, Mercy and me. Last orders weren’t called until sometime close to 2 a.m. Afterwards we all filed through the pesticide-scented night air back to the house and squeezed into the little front room to carry on drinking with an assortment of portable stuff brought from the pub.

Because I was drunk I tried to tell them the truth about the countryside, how it wasn’t what it appeared to be, but somehow the conversation wriggled like an eel and swerved onto appearances in general. Bateman said that despite overwhelming appearances to the contrary he was in reality a really anxious person. He said, ‘Oh yeah, I suffer real bad from my nerves. Like I’ve got this terrible nervous alopecia, except its only on parts of my body where I don’t have any hair, like my knees.’

Mercy said, ‘Yeah, nature’s cruel, isn’t it? I mean you’re all upset about something and then on top of that all your hair falls out! So then you feel even worse. I mean wouldn’t it be nice if, say, you were a baldy bloke and you were feeling really fed up and instead of all the rest of your hair falling out, it grew instead? So like even though you were feeling depressed at least you’d have a nice new head of hair?’

Bateman said, ‘Yeah or if you were a woman and you were feeling anxious about your life, about not having a boyfriend or something but instead of getting agoraphobia or becoming an alcoholic, you grew a really nice big pair of tits. I mean that would be more fair, wouldn’t it?’

‘And you’d probably get a boyfriend because of your tits,’ said Melon.

‘Maybe there’s some sort of reason for alopecia and agoraphobia and that, maybe some sort of balance in nature.’

‘But that’s what I was trying to say before: nature’s a mess up, isn’t it? Look outside — that’s not nature, it’s a factory, a green factory. It’s not meant to be like this…’

Barry Rush who had been quiet for some time said to me, ‘You got kids, Hillary?’

‘Noo I’m afraid not, I never .

‘You never stop worrying about them, know what I mean?’

‘I think I…’

‘Yes, I was really worried about my daughter, my Mercy. I mean she hadn’t had a good seeing to for God knows how long, then a quiet old fellow like Hillary moves in on her. Not the conventional boyfriend I imagined for her but I’m not one to talk.’

I didn’t know what to say to this so I simply simpered and uttered a noise something like ‘nnggnmam’.

Barry went on, ‘So what’s she like? You know, as a fuck? I’ve always wondered. What dad doesn’t? Is she passionate, like her dad? Is she good at sucking you off? She’s got that big wide mouth, I’d think she would be. Do her tits feel as good as they look?’

I stood up. I said, ‘Sir, I count myself as a good host but I will not have anyone, especially her father, talking about Mercy like that. I’ll thank you to leave now.

Barry stared up at me, looking confused.

‘If you don’t leave I’m sure Bateman would be happy to assist you.

‘Will I fuck, Hillary,’ said Bateman.

‘Don’t be a twat, Hillary,’ said Suki.

I looked in appeal from them to Mercy. Surely she would support me. She stared me straight in the eyes and said, ‘Take a chill pill, man. What’s the matter with you?’

As I left the room I heard Barry say to the others, ‘I never fucked her, did I? Even though God knows plenty of fathers do.’

There was a general murmur of approval at his restraint.

 

I lay on the bed. ‘I suppose I’m a stupid old man,’ I said to Mercy who was standing in the doorway. Downstairs I could hear the party still going on. She came in and sat down next to me.

‘Hillary, don’t talk about yourself like that. You’re a lovely man. It’s my dad, I can’t stand up to him. I know I should but I can’t. I know you were only trying to be honourable and I love you for it. How come, though it’s my dad who’s the awful shit, it’s me who somehow feels guilty?’

‘Well I’m not sure, but I think it’s a parent thing, Mercy. I think that he’s holding the child that you were hostage, and you’ll be paying her ransom for the rest of your life.’

‘I see. Thank you.

‘Don’t mention it. You wanted to know.’

And yes, like her dad said, her wide mouth was good for that thing and her breasts were as he imagined them to be. I know a poet should do better than this but it was like riding a horse again after many years, the movements, the postures unaccustomed, yet familiar, mounting her, sliding into her, the sweating twisting body, except now there was a consciousness, a part of me that wasn’t subsumed in the act, a part that worried about falling off. Like riding a horse again after years and the traffic had got faster and more frightening.

 

The next day Mercy’s father and his girlfriend had gone by the time we got up and she went back to sleeping in her own room. She said to me, ‘I don’t want us to be a couple, not yet. I want us to be friends who sometimes do stuff. Do you know what I mean? That’s much more original, isn’t it?’ It was certainly much more frustrating as far as I was concerned since I never knew when she would choose to activate her franchise and I didn’t seem to have much of a voice in the matter. Needless to say, this not knowing did not help my poem to progress. Plus my days seemed to be full of housework and cooking. My evenings were no longer as empty as they had been either, since I’d been recruited into the pub table-skittles team. This strange game, peculiar to Northamptonshire, was exclusively the province of the village proletariat:

Cedric Gull the owner of the local garage, Len Babb who worked on one of Sam’s farms, that sort of person. Twice a week I would be taken to skittle games in Cedric’s 1969 Rover Coupe, enveloped in the smell of cracked leather and lead replacement petrol. Mostly we would talk about Mercy or rather I would answer questions about Mercy for this fifty-year-old father of five as we rocked along the country lanes, Cedric working the big bakelite steering wheel like a ship’s tiller.

There were several pub-skittles leagues: Byfield, Gayton and Town which was Northampton itself, there were fourteen teams in the Byfield League including Lyttleton Strachey. Each team has nine players. As to the game itself, there are nine pins arranged in a square on a table in three rows of three. Each player has three cheeses and has three throws of the cheese at the skittles. A cheese is a piece of wood shaped like a small cheese and painted cheese colour. Each player has five legs for his turn to knock down as many pins as possible. There were various strange terms for the success you could achieve: a flora is when all the pins are demolished with one cheese, a stack is when all the pins are demolished with two cheeses and so on and so forth. Though my recruitment onto the team denoted some raising of my status in the village I had not risen too high as there had always been a problem getting new members: a lot of the newer inhabitants of the Northamptonshire villages had difficulty in seeing the point of throwing cheese-shaped bits of wood at skittles in the evening after a hard day spent designing new forms of poison gas or new methods of torturing animals.

 

It was summer by the time he came again.

One morning I was sitting in my study, the poem inert on my desk. Bateman had just shouted up the stairs that we were out of milk and I needed to ride to the nearest garage to get some, he said; I should also buy Suki some Tampax while I was there. Then the phone rang, and before I spoke a man said, ‘Hello, Hillary.’

‘Yes?’ I replied in a ‘who the fuck are you?’ tone.

‘I was thinking of coming over to pick up my hat.’

‘Is that Emmanuel Porlock, the Million Pound Poet?’

‘Yes indeedy.’

‘I’ve been hanging on to that hat for three months.’

‘Well, I better come and get it then, hadn’t I? Saturday morning alright for you, round about brunchtime?’

‘I suppose so.

‘Excellent, see you then.’

It was only after I put the phone down that I thought to myself, ‘How did he know I’d bought him a new hat?’ I had never spoken to him since the day he had phoned me, badgering me into going up to London and causing me to flirt with Mercy.

Brunch to me is a silly meal and difficult to devise; it’s really a breakfast that’s been lying in bed too long. Nevertheless I have never been able to be inhospitable and, it being later in the year, at least there was more produce available from my garden, so in the end I decided upon courgette fritters with mayonnaise dip, eggs Florentine, Spanish omelette, kedgeree, broad bean dip, nasturtium salad and roast tomatoes with garlic. For cocktails I would do Long Island Iced Teas.

Recently Sam had taken to driving through the low countries and into Germany for his shopping: twice he’d been to Austria and once he’d got as far as the Hungarian border before the lack of a visa caused him to be turned back. There were a couple of bullet holes in the tailgate of his Subaru from where Sam had tried to sneak across the border on a rural back road — he’d heard that things were even cheaper in the ex-east than in the hypermarkets of France. He seemed to be going further and further on each of his trips and to be more distracted and edgy when he was at home. His farms literally ran themselves and he’d pretty much killed all the wildlife for hectares around so one day, I suspected, he simply wouldn’t come back, though I’m sure Mrs Sam would be able to monitor his progress, zig-zagging across the world via GPS satellite and her laptop. Maybe she would be able to see him drive head first into the onrushing Autobahn traffic, a popular method of suicide in Germany so I’d heard. Still it’s an ill obsessive compulsive disorder that brings no one any good, so Sam was able to fetch me from Austria a cake called a Wiener Apfelstrudel Gugelhupf, a Gottinger bacon cake, a selection of wurst and eight bottles of a decent Gerwurtstraminer.

 

His Landrover van swerved into my drive just after 12 o’clock. The day was extremely hot and I was wearing a short-sleeved fawn linen shirt made for me by Domediakis in Berwick Street, Soho, pale cream tropical nine-ounce double-pleated gabardine trousers from Adeney and Briggs and blue-and-white canvas yachting shoes. Earlier that morning I had found the Mau Mau hat still in its paper bag at the back of my sock drawer.

On this visit Emmanuel Porlock was not alone: he had brought his tribe along with him. What a shock. Bev and Martika and the kid Lulu were not as I had imagined them and Emmanuel was not the man he was when unaccompanied by these three.

To paraphrase Tolstoy: all thin families are alike but a fat family is fat after its own fashion. It was truly remarkable to my mind how three human beings could be so fat in three such distinct and individual ways. With Bev the surfeit manifested itself mostly in width, she was a very, very wide woman, enormous flat breasts stretching out to the side of her like stubby wings, gigantic hovercraft-bearing hips, a rolling, boiling stomach that hung down almost to her knees. In Martika, by contrast, the fat was confined solely to her bottom and her stumpy little legs that seemed to bend backwards in an entirely new way, like you see on one of those TV programmes where they try and pretend that they know how dinosaurs walked but really they haven’t a clue so the computer-animated puppet looks all wrong and impossible. In fact Martika might not have known she was fat at all unless she got a good look at her rear view in the mirror, or somebody unkind videoed her. The kid Lulu was just fat all over: fat scalp, fat elbows, fat eyelids, fat heels.

And they were not jolly fat people these three. Though I suppose I am a bit prejudiced, I have never been what I understand is called these days a ‘chubby chaser’; all my women have been trim and capable of looking good in the clothes of the day. I have never been that keen on fat women, so I believe that jolly fat people are only those who try and keep the self-hatred and disgust hidden under cover of jocundity. With this trio the loathing was out in the open and expressed itself mostly in a contempt for Emmanuel Porlock: each thing he said was greeted with a roll of the eyes or a look at the other two or a ‘tsking’ sound. Sometimes one would say to another, ‘What’s he saying now?’ in a scornful tone. Porlock himself was very subdued; overshadowed by them both physically and verbally, he took little part in the conversation and when he did speak his voice had an apologetic, humble note I had not noticed before. Over brunch the women merely jabbed at their food, nibbling at corners and tearing off small strips so that I was left with a great deal of it, which I took away, wrapped in cling film and left on the work surfaces and in the fridge in the kitchen. After they had gone I found the food had somehow departed with them.

I would not have flirted with Mercy in the hat shop three months before if my mind had not been filled with erotic reveries of the life I thought Porlock led with Bev and Martika, taking turns of each other, truffling away with their heads between each other’s slender legs. It was all a great big mistake.

 

After brunch the three females said that they would like to perform their chi gong meditation in my paddock, so Porlock and I had an hour alone to sit in deck chairs out the front. Porlock had the Mau Mau hat on his head even though the sun was bright in the sky. I said to him, ‘There’s something I want to say to you.

‘Go ahead.’

‘In the year 1797 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was staying at a farmhouse, near a place called Porlock, in the county of Somerset. Of course everybody knows that Coleridge was addicted to opium; he took some one particular day, then fell asleep in a chair. Before he took the opium he’d been reading a book about the palace of Kubla Khan. In his opium sleep he started dreaming and in his dream there came into his mind an entire poem of something like two hundred or three hundred lines. When he woke up, what a gift, a whole poem complete! No need for months or years of work but a masterpiece delivered from the subconscious straight to the page. Of course as any of us poets would have done he began furiously writing: “In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure dome decree …”

‘But after writing for a short time, he says in his diary he was “called out by a person on business from Porlock”, who for some reason he didn’t tell to bugger off, politeness maybe, I don’t know. He says this “person from Porlock detained me above an hour”. When he finally got rid of this man he found he had forgotten the rest of the dream. All he had left was fifty-four lines. And that’s all there is of “Kubla Khan” — fifty-four lines, unfinished.’

‘They’re a very good fifty-four lines though,’ said Porlock, ‘so all wasn’t lost.’

‘That’s one way to look at it. The thing of it is, though, I’ve looked for your name all over the place and I can’t find it. There are no books written by you in the bookshops, no poems written by you in any anthologies and the only reference on the internet I can find to your name, connected with poetry, is this “person from Porlock”: not a poet but a man who stopped a great poem being properly written.’

‘There’s something odd here, what are you saying, Hillary?’

‘I don’t quite know what I’m saying except that you don’t seem to be who you say you are and that you have brought terrible disruption to my life.’

‘Me? How have I brought disruption to your life?’

‘You made me go up to town to buy you a new bloody hat. When I was up in town I met Mercy, through meeting Mercy I am now living with a girl who is forty years younger than me, my house is full of noise and her friends, I’m in the stupid skittles team throwing cheese-shaped bits of wood about twice a week and I haven’t written a line of my poem, my great opus, my final testament to the world that will echo down the centuries, in fucking months!’

‘Well, first off, I don’t understand why you can’t find any reference to me, I’m all over, you must be looking in the wrong places. I mean what are you saying, that I’m some sort of sprite who travels through the ages stopping poets writing?’

‘Are you?’

‘Why would such a person exist, what would be the point?’

‘I don’t know, you mentioned something the last time you came: a sort of anti-muse… Maybe there are Porlocks all over the place stopping poets writing, stopping painters painting, for all I know it’s you who stops the gas board coming on the day they say they’re coming and makes the builder abandon his job half completed.’

He was looking discomfited. ‘Look, Hillary, you’re going off the deep end here,’ he paused. ‘Now what may have happened, I admit, is that I may have exaggerated a little bit how advanced I was as a poet. There may not be a lot, well any, of my poetry in actual print. I might have wanted to sort of associate myself with you to help my own career, I admit that. It’s only because I love poetry so. But I tell you this, Hillary, I would give anything to be at the point you are. To be on the edge of a masterpiece must be the greatest thing on earth and I know I wouldn’t let anybody stop me finishing it. You know what? I bet there was no man from Porlock, Coleridge probably only wrote that much and was making up an excuse for not writing any more. You blame me. There is nobody who’s stopping you working except you.

If you can’t write with all these people around then get rid of them. Get rid of Mercy, she’s a nutcase anyway if you ask me, a right mental case. If you get rid of Mercy then the darkie in the dress and the schoolgirl won’t come round either. Hillary, I’d give anything to have your gift and at the moment you’re squandering it. Be ruthless, be focused, get on with it, man!’

 

Over the next week as the heat of summer shimmered above the fields I thought about what I should do. Looking back I am aware that the options I considered are not those that another person might have considered. They were:

One. Going over to the Sams and saying to them, ‘Can I live in one of your sheds?’ I was sure they would let me. I would survive on out-of-date pâté and vacuum-packed saucisson sec while I worked on my poem. Two. I would go and live wild in a bender in the woods, eating foxes or something. I had been trained in bush warfare so it would be like in the old days back in Kenya. Again I would work on my poem while daylight lasted. Three. I could murder Mercy. Murdering Mercy seemed like a situation in which I won either way. If I got away with it then I would have my solitude back to write and if I was caught then I’d have a nice cell in prison to work in. I’m sure they’d let me have a pad and a biro.

You may have noticed none of these options consisted of me simply asking Mercy into the living room for a chat and then saying to her outright, ‘Look, I’m sorry but, Mercy sweetheart, could you just please go away. You’re stopping me working on my poem what with all these people coming round to see you and this thing with us being “friends who touch each other”, which is just a recipe for a cerebral embolism as far as I can see.’ But there was no way I could be so impolite. You might think that murdering someone was a tad rude in itself but I’m sure many women and maybe some men were murdered out of politeness. I’m certain a lot of husbands who wanted to break away couldn’t stand the idea of upsetting their wives, couldn’t imagine themselves saying the hurtful words, couldn’t endure the tears, the shouting, really couldn’t stand the thought of the pain they would cause, so instead they crept up behind them with a ballpen hammer and stove their skulls in.

I thought of a way to do it as well. The bad stuff they were selling in Northampton. If I could get some I could give it to Mercy as a present. Junkie dies, happens all the time.

I rode Mercy’s Piaggio to the back of the bus station on market day. I thought to myself that really he wouldn’t have any of the bad stuff but at least I would have tried. I said to the dealer, ‘I don’t suppose you have any of the bad smack that’s killing people do you?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘I’ve got lots of it, it’s very popular.’

I was a little surprised. ‘Why is it popular if it’s fatal? I’d have thought people would steer clear of it.’

‘Well there, sir, you don’t understand the mind of the drug taker. See, they think that if it’s near fatal it’s got to be an Al great buzz. It’s one of my most successful lines.’

I bought some but when I got it home I knew I couldn’t do it. I went out to the paddock and threw the deadly heroin into my compost heap where it would decompose and give my courgettes an extra zing next harvest time.

 

That evening in my tiny living room as usual Bateman and Suki were there as were a couple of new friends Mercy had made, Jessie and Gunther. They lived on a barge, Jessie was a juggler and Gunther spent his days miming as a silver statue in Northampton market. It was a trifle disconcerting seeing him on the couch as he had not taken his statue make-up off. I had just served them all welsh rarebit and coffee and was about to bring in a walnut cake I’d made earlier. With the TV bellowing in the background Bateman said, ‘You know when we was up in London, Merce, bringin’ your stuff back?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, when we wuz going through the West End in my van, I saw loads of people wearin’ them sweatshirts from like Harvard University and Princeton University but I don’t think them people went to them universities, or if they did then goin’ to one of them Ivy League places don’t help you so much, cos a lot of them peoples wearing them sweatshirts was sellin’ hot dogs from a stall.’

Suki said, ‘Did you go to college, Merce?’

‘Yeah, I did media studies at Harrogate University,’ said Mercy, ‘but you know I can’t remember a single thing about it. Not a thing. I think we went to a big place once to … no it’s gone. What about you, Suki?’

‘I’m still at school, remember.’

‘Oh yeah I forgot, and you, Bateman?’

‘I got a woodwork 0 level in prison. Which is harder than you think when they won’t let you have anything sharp. So, you know, the exam was like, largely theoretical, though I did make a teapot stand using a plastic chisel, paper nails and a rubber hammer.’

And finally, ‘Hillary, what about you?’

‘Oh ummm … well Cambridge, just after the war … you know.’

‘Oh yeah?’ said Bateman. ‘What was that like, then?’

‘Well, it was a unique and rather odd time to be up at university, because on the one hand you had ordinary schoolboys like myself, and on the other a huge number of fellows straight back from the war. They seemed terribly fierce those men, commandeering cars in the middle of the Great North Road when they wanted to go to the pub and so on. And the thing that struck me most was that they were so determined, knew so clearly what they wanted to do. While most of us schoolboys had no idea what we wanted from life, these men had it all figured Out. They felt they had been through such a lot that their generation could do things in an entirely new way: write theatre plays that would bring about socialism in Scotland at their first performance, design monorails that ran under the sea powered by plankton, make typewriters that you could wear as a sombrero. And apart from re-making the world they knew they could also re-make themselves. These boy soldiers would study like never before because they had walked through the gates of Buchenwald; they would no longer be drunk because they had ridden a Superfortress to the canopy of the earth; they would no longer be shy around girls as a memorial to their best friend who they’d seen drowned, gargling in black engine oil, slipping beneath the cold North Sea. But after a year or so had gone by, their true natures, who they really were, suspended for the duration of the war, like Association Football, began to re-emerge. The drunks were brought back to college by the police having parked their MGs in cake-shop windows, the lazy stayed later and later in bed, the shy lost the composure that killing had given them and ran in fear from girls as they had never run from the Japanese. You see what I’m trying to say? You cannot be other than who you are and you cannot act in any other way than your nature permits you to act, do you understand that? It’s no use trying to fight it, you’re stuck with yourself.’

They were silent for a while then Suki said, ‘I heard about this bloke, right, got a terrible shock, right? But instead of his hair turning white, it turned red!’

‘What colour was it before?’

‘Dunno, brown I expect.’

That morning I had sat in front of my unfinished poem for what I think will be the last time. I had gathered up the bits of paper and put them in a drawer: not even the fifty-four lines of ‘Kubla Khan’.

There was high-pitched mewling from outside in the back garden, I looked up. Adrian jumped up onto the window sill and stood there crying to be let in, his pink mouth opening and closing in petulant supplication. The others seemed to be too sunk into the furniture to get up so I went over to the window and opened it, the cat jumped down into the room and began clawing the moquette of the one Hille armchair that had so far escaped his depredation. I sat back down and the cat climbed onto my lap, sinking his claws into my best Gieves and Hawkes moleskin trousers and coiling himself with his nose up his bottom; after a few seconds he began purring.

Mercy said to me, ‘You got a cat after all, didn’t you, Hillary? You said the first time we met in that shop, you said that you thought you couldn’t stand the pain of having another cat. That you get to a point in life where the pain wipes out the pleasure. Where you’d rather settle for no pleasure than pay for it in pain. But really it’s better, isn’t it, having another heartbeat around the house and all that?’

‘Well, I’m not sure …’ I said, but then I saw she was looking at me with an expression of such savage entreaty on her face that I changed my tone and said in a cheerier voice that sounded in my head like clattering tin trays, ‘Yes, it’s better having one rather than not having one …

Then I added, ‘… just.’