13
‘Let me see now. You’re still working with Environmentally Friendly Investments?’
‘Oh yes, I am.’ I told Mr Markby, my probation officer, nothing but the truth.
‘Good! I’m glad to hear it. There’s nothing more vitally important in our world today than global warming.’
‘Oh, I agree. It’s in my thoughts twenty-four hours a day.’
This was a bit of a lie, because global warming scarcely ever crosses my mind. But Mr Markby looked pleased and said, ‘Good, very good!’ and ticked another box on his form.
‘I sometimes wonder how you managed to land a job with Mr McGrath. Have you had any training in business studies?’
‘Not much,’ I had to admit. ‘I think he took me on as a favour.’
‘Leonard McGrath wanted to help you go straight!’ Mr Markby seemed deeply impressed. ‘How long have you known him?’
‘I was at school with his young brother.’
‘At school with Leonard McGrath’s brother?’ Mr Markby was being a bit of an echo.
‘Yes, I was.’
‘Well, look what he’s made of his life. Runs his own important business. That should’ve been an example to you.’
‘Well yes. It has been in a way.’
‘Good. Excellent.’ Mr Markby seemed easy to please that day. ‘They’re looking for a new man to head up SCRAP. I put Leonard McGrath’s name forward. I hope he won’t mind.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be pleased.’ Of course I could see the funny side of it. Then my probation officer leaned back in his chair and said, ‘By the way, are you seeing any more of your so-called praeceptor, that Miss Purefoy?’
‘Not much.’ I lied again. I didn’t think he needed to know about my friends.
‘Good. I’m glad of that. Those girls rush in where we probation officers are careful where we tread. She was obviously misinformed as to your place of residence. She said you were staying on some farm somewhere. You weren’t, were you?’
‘Never.’
‘I thought not. Well, my advice to you is to give that Miss Purefoy a wide berth.’
‘All right then.’
‘So long as you hold down your job with Mr Leonard McGrath . . .’
‘That’s just what I mean to do.’
‘And report to me regularly, I’m quite happy.’
I’d never really forgiven Mr Markby for delaying my parole, although he seemed a good deal more friendly since I moved in with Chippy. There was one piece of his advice, however, that I was determined not to take, and that was the bit about giving Lucy ‘a wide berth’, which I suppose meant I mustn’t see her again.
Well, the hell with that, Mr Markby. It was a bit surprising at the time, but it seemed that I wanted to see Lucy more than ever I had before. I suppose life’s like that, isn’t it? When she was busy trying to reform me I wanted to get as far away from her as possible. But when she said she’d given me up as a bad job I felt I couldn’t get enough of her. It wasn’t just the way she looked, I swear to you it wasn’t. Of course she looked the sort of girl you’re proud to have sitting next to you at the bar of the Beau Brummell. I’d found out you could have a good conversation with her, and good conversations weren’t easy to come by around the maisonette.
So I was seriously thinking of giving Lucy a bell again, but before I got round to doing that she rang me at the maisonette and sounded, I thought, a bit less confident and sure of herself than usual.
‘I wonder if you’d like to go out with me some time. Have dinner together or something?’ You see what I mean? That wasn’t the usual Lucy, who knew exactly what she wanted. It also reminded me of the different sort of worlds we came from. When I was a kid, ‘dinner’ was something you only got on Sundays if you were lucky. What you had in the evening was your ‘tea’. Now I’d drifted up in the world of dinner eaters, like Chippy McGrath and Lucy Purefoy.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you out.’ Let her pay a bill, I thought, and she’ll be back feeling she’s in control and trying to reform me. ‘Shall we say Thursday?’ That wasn’t too soon, although I wasn’t doing anything in particular on the other nights of that week.
‘I’d love to see you on Thursday.’ She seemed to be genuinely pleased.
‘All right, I’ll ring you. Time and place. I’ll pick a good one.’
The truth was that I had no idea where to pick. I had to consult a well-known member of the smart set - Mr Leonard McGrath.
‘The in place now is definitely La Maison Jean Pierre,’ Chippy told me. ‘Jean Pierre is a personal friend. Your girlfriend’s going to love it.’
‘All right then, but she’s not my girlfriend.’
‘Only trouble is . . . you won’t get a table in less than six months’ time.’
‘We can’t go there then.’
‘Unless we ask for it in my name. Lift the phone, would you, Diane? When do you want to go?’
‘Say . . . Thursday?’
‘Oh, it’s Leonard McGrath’s office here,’ Diane told the ‘in place’. ‘Mr McGrath would like a table for two on Thursday. Yes, dinner. Shall we say eight o’clock? Cool.’ She put down the phone. ‘They’re looking forward to seeing us.’
‘But they’ll be seeing me.’
‘Just say I came down with a heavy cold,’ Chippy told me, ‘so I sent you to take my place as you run my accounts department and it’s your birthday.’
I rang Lucy in her office as I couldn’t get an answer from her flat. ‘I’ll pick you up at your place in a taxi,’ I told her.
‘No, no, don’t do that. I’ll meet you at the restaurant. Where are we going?’
‘La Maison Jean Pierre.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘I may not be, but I’m still taking you to La Maison Jean Pierre. Apparently it’s the in place nowadays.’
‘Who told you that? Leonard McGrath at Environmentally Friendly Investments?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘All right then, I’ll meet you there.’ She was laughing. I couldn’t tell why us going to this place to eat had amused her so much.
The restaurant, when we got into it, wasn’t all that funny either. It was in a room with white walls and steel furniture, like the sort of place you expect to see on a hospital wing. There were a few pictures on the walls, but they didn’t seem to be pictures of anything, just plain colours. They were the sort of thing I’d have left on the walls of any house I’d broken into. It’s true the place was very full and busy and it was quite a while before some sort of top waiter arrived and told us what to order. ‘Tonight, Jean Pierre recommends,’ he said, and made it clear that it was what we’d choose unless we were a couple of idiots who’d never seen the inside of a five-star restaurant before. He had tight lips and was just as determined to control my choices as Mr Markby, my probation officer.
I can’t remember much about the food we ate except it was a big let-down and, on the whole, pretty disgusting. The idea of a good feed never seemed to have entered the mind of Jean Pierre or his kitchen staff. The starter was something to do with marinated seaweed, which wasn’t anything I’d have to eat again. The fish didn’t look much like any fish I’d ever met before and had a taste of meat about it, and a salad of plums and raspberries, with not a chip in sight. On the whole I think we did better, food-wise, in the Burger King in Notting Hill. Not much of that’s worth remembering, but what I’ll never ever forget is what happened when all this rubbish had been cleared away and all we had was two cups of coffee on the table. All we had, that is, until Lucy produced - well, I’ll have to tell you what she produced and perhaps it’ll surprise you as much as it surprised me.
She’d been sort of excited during the meal with lots of ‘Mmmmm, this is delicious!’ which I think she did more out of politeness to me than because she genuinely enjoyed what we were eating. And then, when we got to the coffee part, she was, as I’ve said, excited.
She opened her handbag and put something down on the tablecloth.
‘I got this for you,’ she said.
What she’d got was a dirty old coin that might have been shiny years and years ago but was now a sort of dull green colour - I picked it up and I could just make out a bald head and some letters I could hardly read.
‘That’s very kind,’ I said. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. ‘Did you buy this for me?’
‘No,’ she said, and by now she was almost laughing. ‘I stole it for you.’
‘You did what?’ I was so surprised that I asked her while the waiter was hovering.
She was a bit more cautious, she only said, ‘I told you what I did.’
‘But why?’ I asked her as the waiter moved away. It seemed like, well, like the whole world had turned upside down.
‘I suppose because I wanted to understand you properly.’
‘Understand me? Am I so peculiar or something?’
‘It was what you said about the excitement. You said it was the extraordinary excitement that made you do it.’
‘That’s part of it, of course.’
‘Part of it? It seemed to me the way you said it, it was the whole of it.’
‘And earning a living, of course.’
‘I suppose there is that,’ she seemed a bit disappointed, ‘but you said it was the excitement you’d miss.’
‘I may have said that.’
‘But you’re not missing it now, are you?’
‘No, not exactly. I’m working.’
‘Well, I want to work with you. To be together. That was what was wrong before. We came from separate worlds.’
‘Of course we did.’
‘You agree with me? That’s fine.’
I thought of my world. According to the likes of my Uncle Arthur and Aunt Dot, a woman’s place was in the kitchen or looking after the kids if there were any, not out robbing banks and building societies, blowing safes or holding up security guards.
‘You see, it was like when I was being trained by SCRAP,’ she said. ‘We learnt all of what it was like trying to reform people, getting them cheap places to sleep and not very well-paid jobs. If you could do that you were a great success to SCRAP. They never taught us what it was like to live by stealing things. Nobody told us anything about the excitement.’
‘I wish I never had.’ I can’t say I really approved of what was going on.
‘No, Terry, I’m so glad you did. I feel we’ve come together. We can really bond.’
I didn’t say anything to that, but she put her hand on mine on the table. I looked down at the greenish coin.
‘What did you say this was exactly?’
‘A Roman coin from the time of the Emperor Claudius. It was found in a field near St Albans.’
‘What do you expect me to do with it?’
‘Fence it,’ she told me, ‘through your usual chap. Where does he hang out?’
‘Brighton,’ I told her. She was getting to know some of the ropes already.
I had to pull out a number of tenners to pay the bill. Lucy watched me doing this and said, ‘Ill-gotten gains!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I expect everyone’s paying with gains that are more or less ill-gotten. Faked expense accounts, pretending to be entertaining for business reasons, tax fiddles. It’s just that yours are more openly ill-gotten, aren’t they, darling?’
It was the first time anyone had called me that for years.
I took Lucy back to Notting Hill in a taxi. She seemed happy enough until we got to her flat, but she looked up and saw that the lights were on. Then she said, ‘Oh damn!’ and gave me a sort of fluttering kiss which just missed my mouth and landed on my nose. Then she jumped out of the taxi and ran away from me.
Lucy might have gone a long way to understand me, but she was still a bit of a puzzle so far as I was concerned. I felt in my pocket. The old green coin was still there.