Godfrey was annoyed. He did not like ever to admit fault in himself, but now he realized that he had made a real mess out of this one. The only time a girl had ever got under his skin and this had to happen. There are hundreds of women with good looks and he had to pick on her.
That was the way it was right from the bell, and the second round did all the damage. He was not a raper from choice: he didn’t have to be. Girls told him he was no worse looking than a film star, and if that was a bit of flannel it was not all flannel. Normally he had more traffic than he could handle.
But he had to pick on the one who played hard to get. Right from the beginning he had known she was different, and he had handled it very cool at the start. This often paid because they didn’t know whether you were attracted or not, but it hadn’t paid this time, at least not with his follow-up.
That time in the train he had tried hard to explain to her, but he wasn’t very good at explaining. It was after a fight: it gets in your system: it’s something to do with the bip-bip-bip of blood and muscle. Perhaps in a way like in the old days you killed a man and had his girl. So he’d not paid enough attention to the fact that she was different, and a bit superior and a bit haughty, and he’d hurt her feelings and maybe frightened her – though privately he thought that part put on; what girl is really scared of what all girls want?
But he’d gone on too long, shouting after her in the wood, using a few hard words. Because he always had had what he wanted – which comes surprising from an orphanage product, but true enough of the important things. What Little God wants Little God gets. So he’d been pretty mad. First he’d been done out of finishing off Hertz and then he was done out of her. He surely would have leaned on her if he could have found her. But he was sorry afterwards, sorry he’d got so snotty, and he’d tried to make it up. Still wanted to. Badly. Had to. He kept thinking about her. What Little God wants Little God gets. Even if what he wants doesn’t want him. But he couldn’t really believe that.
‘Aggressive’ was the word they used about him at the orphanage. ‘Aggressive.’ He always fancied that. It summed him up. But he didn’t like to feel he hadn’t a smooth line where women were concerned, no subtlety, that irked.
The visit to the Trad Hall had been a coincidence in the first place, all stemming from his ‘aggressiveness’ of twelve months ago. Because it was in the middle of his suspension that he was in Newmarket with a mate for the Cesarewitch – there’s always extra work and pickings of some sort at a time like that – and he got a job driving a van for Sir George Wayland – or his stable anyhow, his steward – ferrying things from his place which was about twenty miles away. And Sir George himself seemed to take a fancy to Godfrey – not unusual, people often did – and Sir George had done some boxing when he was a lad, he said; so when the meeting was over Godfrey stayed on at his place where there was a house party, helping around the house with odd jobs of this and that.
And the day the party was breaking up, Godfrey was getting ready to go when Sir George sent for him and said: ‘Lady Vosper’s chauffeur has had a stroke and has gone off to hospital. Have you ever driven a Jensen?’ He said no, he hadn’t, but he could drive anything on four wheels; and this woman got up from her chair and came across and looked at him as if he was a piece of pre-wrapped sirloin in a supermarket. She was a middle-aged woman who walked like a man and had skirts too short for her age and he hated her on sight. He thought, I’ll tell her where she can stuff her lousy car, but just then she said: ‘You’re a boxer, are you, Brown? Warned off the course, eh? Suspended. Drunk in the ring or something?’
‘Don’t drink,’ he said and gave her a look that should have dried up anyone.
But all she said was: ‘I’m a driver, Brown. But I’ve been warned off the course. Suspended. Drunk in charge. So we’re both more or less in the same mess.’ And she snorted with laughter.
He stood there wooden, not knowing what to make of this, whether to walk away or answer something rude, when Sir George said: ‘Lady Vosper is not permitted to drive her own car, Brown, and would like you to drive her to her home in Suffolk. It’s about fifty miles. I imagine you can do this. It’s more or less on your way to London, if you’re going to London.’
‘It’s worth a fiver,’ said this Vosper woman. ‘If you get me there safe. I’m otter hunting in the morning. Can you drive, boy? Speak up.’
So he spoke up. Try anything once. But when he got in the car she came and sat beside him and watched closely how he handled it, especially the automatic change which took getting used to, having nothing to do with your left foot. But after a few ghastly jerks when he tried to de-clutch with the brake, he mastered it.
She talked nearly all the way to this place, Handley Merrick, this village where she lived. After a bit you had to hand it to her, she was a game old bird. She knew more about cars than Godfrey thought there was to know. She had raced, actually raced, she claimed, at Silverstone, and after his first sneering disbelief he began to wonder if it might be true. She knew the inside of an Aston Martin like most women know the inside of their dressing table. She knew nothing about boxing, but hunting, racing, shooting, climbing, all that, she’d done the lot.
So he got more at ease as they went on, and was soon telling her about his life, how he had moved from fighting in a fairground to the A.B.A. for a couple of years while he did odd jobs at a garage touching up hot cars, working on a building site shovelling hard core, bookie’s runner, looking after the dogs. She asked him, so he told her how a man called Regan paid him £100 to turn pro and had put him in a few fly-weight contests. It was small time, but he had begun as Godfrey Brown of Birmingham and later he had moved up to the feathers.
Then there was a spot of trouble that had really been Regan’s fault, but Godfrey carried the can for it, and he had been warned by the British Boxing Board of Control. After that things didn’t go so well between him and Regan, and one night, the only night he’d been stopped, when he’d been matched against a light-weight called Carmel, Regan came in the dressing room before he’d had time to cool off and started ranting at him for boxing so badly. And somehow in a flash things got out of hand and Regan had a black eye and a bleeding nose. So the next day he was out on his ear, and the B.B. B.C. had him up before them again and this time it was a fine of £20 and a twelve months’ suspension.
All this the Vosper woman seemed to find very funny, and the fact that she found it funny helped Godfrey to see his grievance in a better light. She told him how she had been driving home fast one night, back to London, and near Chelmsford had skidded on an icy road and run into a van. Not too much damage but the police came and tested her and found she’d had too much so she was fined £100 and disqualified for a year – nine months still to go.
‘Drunk?’ she said. ‘Of course I wasn’t drunk. Damned fools! But I’d had a lot to drink. When haven’t I? It doesn’t make any difference to the way I drive, except to make me more careful. When I was a gel, used to have to drive my father home, big four-and-a-half litre Bentley, big as a steam engine. I used to drink much more then, so that I couldn’t walk straight. But drive straight – that was second nature. I used to get in, shove the lever in first gear, and stay there all the way home. It was heavy on the petrol but safe as could be. Fools and their drink tests! It’s intelligence tests people should take!’
Godfrey thought once of telling her that he had never bothered to get a driving licence, but he thought better not. And this was lucky because when they got to the house where she lived she said would he like to stay on as temporary driver until her own chauffeur came back. He said yes he would and thought it’s not going to be so temporary if I know anything, seeing that chauffeur carried out of the house by a couple of body snatchers to an ambulance and him unconscious and snoring. He’d only seen one before like that, in the ring, and he died on the way to hospital.
So he stayed on and he was right, her chauffeur never came back, so the temporary became sort of permanent and the permanent sort of indispensable.
Lady Vosper had a handsome flat in London as well as Merrick House and she spent more time in London than in the country, but he seemed to slide into both pretty well. She had hardly any staff at either place, just a man and wife in the great place in Suffolk and a daily woman in Wilton Crescent – and Godfrey. Godfrey always because he drove her wherever she went.
Merrick House in Suffolk was in Godfrey’s opinion as big as the orphanage where he’d been reared and about as beautiful. All the Vospers, Lady V said, had been army men, except the one that built it, who was a merchant and made a fortune in Victorian times and pulled down the original house and put this up in its place. But if he had built it, it was the army men who had left their ticket. The place was cluttered with souvenirs of this battle and that war, somebody’s standard at Malplaquet, muskets from Waterloo, cannons from Sebastopol. Half the time you fell over the things. But there had been another war since then and the house had been used as a paratroop training school, and no one had spent much money on it since, so it was a fair shambles in parts. The small wing where Lady Vosper lived was cosy enough, but the main part was as draughty as a building site, and at night it reminded Godfrey of something out of Son of Dracula.
Being chauffeur was a good enough job while he was still serving his suspension, and he tried to keep in with Lady Vosper, because it occurred to him that she knew practically everybody, and when the time came a word from her might give him a leg up the ladder. So it was more than two months before he realized the way things were really drifting. It had not occurred to Rudolph Valentino Brown that Flora Vosper was fancying him for more than the way he drove a car. Modest Little God.
But she was not above dropping a hint, and after a little hesitation and a pause for inspection he was not above taking it. He reckoned from what she said that she was around forty-six, but he was not all that particular where there was good for Godfrey to be got out of it. And of course it was something to lay a real Viscountess. The first and only time in his life that he was nervous. Because this wasn’t just merely having it off with a woman old enough to be your mother. It was something else again.
And of course she was not that bad to look at if the light wasn’t too bright, and he had to confess she learned him a thing or two. And he pleased her. He’d plenty of go, and there was no training to think about. And there was one thing he specially liked about her, she never got sloppy. A lot of women get sloppy after and chat you up about love. They get clinging and cloying. Even just after it’s over and you want a fag and a change of thought, they’ll wrap their moist arms round you and want to talk about how wonderful it all is. She did not. She never did. When she wanted it she wanted it, and when it was over it was over.
So it was surprising and yet not surprising that their relationship changed so little. In the bedroom she called him Godfrey, but out of it it was Brown. And for a long time he never called her Flora to her face. It’s hard for a woman to be bossy when she’s looking at the ceiling, but she was always the one in charge at other times.
The only fly in the ointment, the only real nasty difficulty in all this was Miriam, Lady Vosper’s sour-faced pimply daughter of twenty-six or so. She was married to someone on the stage, and it seemed to Godfrey that Lady V kept them both. So in a manner of speaking there was enmity between rival claimants on Lady V’s generosity. It did not take long for Miriam to spot what was going on between mother and chauffeur, and she did her best to cramp Godfrey every way she could. Once Godfrey listened at the door and heard Miriam rowing with her Mum over all the expensive shirts and ties and jackets he had. Lady Vosper just laughed and said she didn’t buy them, he did what he liked with his money, and Miriam said, then you must wildly over-pay him, and Lady V said, on the contrary, and she’d never had such a good chauffeur before.
When his suspension was up he had been in her employment four months, but he was not for throwing up such a comfy berth for a while. He was as flabby as Tottenham pudding, and he had to get in training again, and he put it to Lady V that he could do this in his off time and meanwhile look out for a new stable which wasn’t going to be any piece of cake while Regan was telling his story of a black eye, etc. The name of Godfrey Brown was going to be a smear word for quite a time to come. So then she said, ‘Why don’t you change your name? People soon forget.’ ‘They’ll take care to remember this,’ he said. ‘ Boxing’s a small world.’ So she said: ‘ Yes, but it’ll be easier under another name and Brown is such a dull name. Did you ever know your father?’ ‘ I never knew my mother,’ he said, ‘ the bitch. Brown was give me at the orphanage.’ ‘Given,’ said Lady Vosper. ‘Eh?’ ‘Given. Was given me at the orphanage.’
They were talking on their way down to Handley Merrick and suddenly he said: ‘How about me taking the name of Vosper? Not for keeps but for boxing. Boxing as Godfrey Vosper.’ He hadn’t an idea how she’d react but she seemed pleased by it, amused, it tickled her fancy like having a racehorse named after her, so that was how it was fixed.
Soon after that he met Robins who was an old pug and managing two other lads and was willing to take him on. Robins was even less lively than Regan and not the man for a pressing youngster, but at least he was in London, so Godfrey signed up, but only for two years instead of the usual three because Robins would pay him nothing to join. Godfrey still hoped that Lady Vosper would be able to pull a few strings or put in a word for him with one of her friends, but no such luck.
He had two fights under his new manager – crummy preliminaries they were, while the audience were still scratching their way into their seats – and Lady V watching him win the first well inside the distance, when she had to go into hospital for a couple of weeks and he was left on his tod.
So being free he took the big car and did a little joy-riding in it and after a row with his current girl he ended up one night at the Trad Hall Redgate, casing the talent, and who should he pick up with but this girl.
She was too big for him really, and not his usual style at all, he liked more glitter. And anyway she didn’t want him. So he tried to forget her.
And he tried to forget her.
There was a woman at that first fairground in Yarmouth that used to sell love potions. Godfrey thought that maybe somebody had shaken some of this potion on his chips in place of pepper. Not that he admitted anything to do with the word love. It wasn’t in his book. But he wanted Pearl the way he had not wanted anyone before, and he felt he wanted her for keeps. It was that bad. And what Little God wants Little God gets.
After chatting her up on the train and the second Big Brush-Off he did nothing for a while. Flora Vosper had come out of her hospital and was temperamental and hard to get on with. He guessed she still had a hangover from all the tests and things, and when you caught her without her make-up she looked a bad colour like she had had one in the solar-plexus and was trying to hide it. Usually he could make her laugh – she laughed easy – but it was not so easy now.
It was at this time that he first caught Miriam up to something. In the flat in London, the woman, Mrs Hodder, came in daily and cooked the midday meal and went home at four. Almost every night Lady V would go out to dinner, but once in a while she would stay in and cook something or have a salad and a glass or so of champagne. They always ate separately even when there was just the two of them, she in the dining room and he in the kitchen, but after, if she asked him in for a brandy, he would know what this meant. He would go in and sit down and talk and make her laugh, and she would swallow two brandies to his one, and after a while they would drift into her bedroom. It was dead smooth: he came in one door Brown her chauffeur, an hour later he would follow her through the other door, Godfrey her bed mate. Then after they had fraternized he would slip out and pad off to his own little room, Brown the chauffeur, back on his beat.
In the kitchen there was the usual cutlery but also a lot of odd junk that had been brought from Merrick House, clumsy spoons and forks with three prongs instead of four, and one evening when Miriam had been visiting he came in the kitchen unexpectedly and she was stuffing some of these in her handbag. He pretended not to notice but the next day he asked Lady Vosper what they were and she said they were Jacobean and had belonged to a Sir Henry Vosper, way back before the first Viscount. Godfrey guessed then they were worth a lot of folding so he told her he had seen Miriam putting some of them in her bag.
It was always a touchy point. Whenever he mentioned Miriam Lady V would get an attack of stuffed-shirtism, so there was the usual haughty answer, and it took him all the following day to get on friendly terms again. But the next week she suddenly said: ‘ I spoke to Mrs McNaughton about what you said. She was taking the silver to be cleaned and polished. Afterwards it will be lodged in the bank, as it’s too valuable to leave about.’ He didn’t believe a word of it, not one word, because of Miriam’s attitude.
Just after this Lady Vosper decided to go to Cannes and she wanted Godfrey to drive her down. This was awkward because he was now in training for a fight – it was out in Reading but was about the best he had had so far with Robins and likely to be the last of what you might call the season – and Robins would play up if he didn’t train properly for it.
So he told Flora Vosper that he could not go. She had been feeling seedy again, but she still seemed badly to want him around and in attendance. Instead of giving him the sack, as he expected, she sent for Robins unknown to him and gave Robins a couple of snorting drinks and offered to let her chauffeur train in Cannes, and Robins was so impressed at talking with a real Countess – as he called her afterwards – that he said it was all right for Godfrey to go.
They were all set to leave on the Friday morning, so on the Thursday he asked if he could borrow the car for an hour or two. He wanted to see Pearl again before he left. It was crazy maybe, it was crazy. But he wanted to see her again. Somehow he’d got to make her. It was more of a challenge than being in the ring.
So he drove down to Selsdon thinking to call at 12, Sevenoaks Avenue, and wondering whether he’d get the evil eye from that foreign woman who opened the door before, or whether he should just hang about outside in the hope Pearl would not stay in the whole of such a smashing evening. And he was still very undecided and just turning into Badger’s Drive a second time, which is the next avenue, when who should he see but Pearl herself stepping out briskly towards her home.
He came up slowly behind her. She had a light summery frock on, short enough to see all but the best part of her legs, and a thin mack over her arm and a green lizard handbag, and she was wearing her browny-blonde hair loose, but she’d had it cut a bit and it was shoulder length and swung and fell heavy as she walked. Not many women in short skirts look good from behind. She looked good from behind. He said to himself, play it gentle, God, take it easy, don’t scare her.
But how do you play it gentle, when you’re catching her up like this? If he didn’t say something …
So he said something. He said: ‘Hi, there, Pearl! Can I give you a lift?’
Well, whatever way it ought to have been done, that wasn’t the way, because she threw a start like someone had given her the needle and stared open-eyed at him, looking as if she was going to drop her mack and run.
‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘I was just passing and saw you. Thought I’d stop and see how you was going on.’
Her eyes had glazed over after the first surprise, and she turned away and started walking on without saying a word. He followed her, kerb crawling, keeping pace.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ve not got leprosy or V.D. I told you I’m sor-ry. Can’t you just stop and chat?’
They went on. It was a long avenue, and no parked cars here, thanks be.
He said: ‘I’m going away tomorrow. I’ll be away some while. Going to France.’
‘Please stay away,’ she said. ‘Stay away from me.’ And she seemed out of breath.
Just then a car came towards them and blew its horn loud because Godfrey was driving on the wrong side of the road. Somebody shouted, ‘bloody fool!’ as it swerved past. Godfrey tapped the accelerator and shot ahead, killed the engine, then got out and came back to meet her.
She came on and then stopped. It was still daylight although the sun had set, but there was no one about. There was this sound of a lawn mower somewhere, and a dog yapping, that was all. She came on and they were about twenty feet apart. She looked white round the gills. Then she looked at the house she was near, and quick as you please she had turned to open the gate. ‘Oyster!’ he shouted. ‘ For Chrissake!’ and he jumped at her and grabbed her arm. It felt good but she wrenched it away and her sleeve tore and she went running up the path and banged on the knocker of this house.
His friends sometimes told Godfrey that in the ring he didn’t know when to put up the shutters. But he knew now. The torn sleeve did it. For you can talk your way out of most things if you’re smart enough, but not out of a torn sleeve. All they had to do was pick up the blower and dial the dicks. From then on he’d be in trouble.
So before the door was even opened he beat it back to the car, started up, roared off round the corner, and hoped no one had noted his number or he might be in trouble with Lady Vosper too.
They stayed in Cannes three weeks altogether, and as for training to meet Bob Saunders he did nothing, but nothing. Flora was in bed half the time, so he found a girl called Françoise and that way he got about as untrained as he well could be for six three-minute rounds against a smart little up-and-coming southpaw from Reading. But he thought he was getting Pearl thoroughly out of his system, and his mates in the Rob Robins stable had said that Saunders could box but carried nothing really dangerous in either hand.
When it came to the night he had only had one week of hard training but he was pretty confident of himself – he didn’t ever really get soft, he found, not soft – so he took on Saunders with a will. But if his spar mates said Saunders carried no punch they had never been in the ring with him. By the fourth round instead of him having Saunders in a corner it was the other way round and he was bleeding from the old cut on his eyebrow and wearing lips like a Negro. In the end he got the verdict, which was a good thing for Lady V who was in the front row and had put £100 on him, but the decision was so narrow that most of the hall screamed and jeered for the other man.
The next day he was bushed: it was the first time ever since the fight with Carmel that he’d been marked, and he cursed his own carelessness and nervously felt his face to see if a bit of pressing would help it go back in shape. It was the only thing that got him ragged, damage to his looks, and in a way he blamed Lady V for putting the temptation in his way to get out of condition. They had a couple of rows – not about his face of course; rows always develop about something different – but to his surprise he found her taking sauce that a couple of months ago would have seen him out without a week’s notice. It marked a change: she needed him and she couldn’t hide it any longer that she needed him. They went down to Merrick House for three weeks – not that he minded this because he couldn’t even try to see Pearl before his face was back in shape – but when they got down there Flora was ill again and he got pretty well landed as a nursemaid.
All the same, more or less against his will, he was developing a sneaking admiration for old Flora. Sick or well she was a good sport and she depended on him for light relief. He could make her laugh when she didn’t feel like laughing, and it pleased him to have an audience for his jokes. Often he could get her to eat when she didn’t feel like eating. The local doctor shook his head over her a few times, but she still drank enough to sink a row boat and smoked like Battersea Power Station; and the minute she felt better she was off on some jaunt or other.
He knew she would miss him when he went.
In Merrick House he caught Miriam at the same games as before on one of her visits. This time she had taken two little pictures off the walls in the gun-room. It was the purest chance he caught her, and he pretended not to see, and, after some think work, he decided not to mention it to Lady V.
Flora recovered and they returned to London. Summer is a close season for fights, at least for the small fry, so Godfrey kept his comfy slot and worked on her to help him in the autumn. Sometimes he suspected she was playing foxy, pretending that one day she’d help him but privately taking care not to lose her chauffeur.
During this time he thought a lot of Pearl. There was still the challenge, the picturing of what she’d be like.
So one dusty evening when he had taken Flora to bridge and had three free hours, he slipped back to the flat and changed into his new lemon yellow tweed jacket with a navy shirt and a pale silk tie. He thought he looked O.K., and more than one woman thought he looked O. K. when he stopped at traffic lights on the way down to Selsdon. He hadn’t a mark left after the Saunders fight; they’d all cleared up great; only that eyebrow from the bout with Carmel and he had learned a new trick with that: you borrowed one of Lady V’s eyebrow pencils and darkened in the break so that nobody would hardly notice.
He bought a big box of chocolates on the way down. They’re a good excuse for a frontal attack, and surely after all this time …
A boy opened the door of the house, age fourteen or so, sticking his snout round the door as if he expected somebody else. Godfrey the disappointment.
‘Is Pearl in?’ Very polite he tried it.
The boy stared at him, hair like a ball of tarred string. ‘She doesn’t live here any more.’
‘What?’
‘Pearl doesn’t live here any more, she’s married.’
Godfrey stared, mouth open, like when you’ve walked into a right hook. Not out, quite easy to stay on your feet, but waiting for the bell to get a breather.
‘Married? Get off.’
‘Two weeks last Tuesday.’
‘Get off. Who to?’
‘A man.’ The boy giggled.
‘I know that, clever. What’s his name?’
‘Angell!’
‘Angell?’
‘Like they fly in the sky.’
‘Leslie!’ called a voice. It was that woman, Pearl’s step-mother. ‘Who is it?’
‘A man. Wants Pearl.’
‘She’s not here.’
‘I’ve told him.’ The door was closing, Leslie disappearing.
‘Hold on,’ Godfrey said and felt in his pocket, fished out half a crown. ‘Got her address?’
The boy looked at the half crown, then looked past Godfrey at the parked car. ‘Tell you for five bob.’
Godfrey would have liked to beat the little gett’s head against the door, but the foreign woman would be out in a second. ‘O.K.’
The boy held out his hand. ‘Pay first.’
Red spots dancing, Godfrey felt in his pocket, found a two shilling piece and sixpence, handed them over.
‘In London,’ said the boy.
‘What? That’s no good. Where in London?’
‘Cadogan Mews. I’ve forgot the number. On a corner. Right in the West End. Smashing house.’
‘What’s the number?’
‘Leslie!’
‘Coming …’
Quick as if he was riding a punch he pulled his head back and slammed the door in Godfrey’s face.
Little God stood there, thinking of kicking the door in. But it would have spoilt his shoes, which were best calf that Flora had bought him in Bond Street. He looked around but there was nothing. Then he spotted a plant pot in the next door garden, with an old moth-eaten fern growing out of it. He leaned over the wall and picked it up, judged the distance to the edge of the street. He nipped in the car and started the engine, then got out and heaved the plant pot through the front-room window. It made a hell of a row on a quiet summer evening, and before the last bit of glass had stopped splintering he was in the car and revving up and away.
He felt mean. He felt mean like he only did usually in the ring. He could have crashed the car into the first car he met. He would have liked to get out in Purley and pick a fight with a policeman. Or go around with that guy he went round with in Birmingham, breaking up kiosks and smashing bus windows. Or taking a woman some place.
He drove home and got more curses from other drivers than he had ever had in his life before and he kept his window down so he could curse back. By luck there wasn’t an accident, not even a scrape or a bent bumper. He stopped in Wilton Crescent and all the places outside the flat were taken for Chrissake, so he had to park two hundred yards away and walk back. And he let himself in and slammed the door hard enough to nearly bring the chimney pots down. And he went into the drawing room and switched on all the lights and slumped on to the settee and put his expensive calf leather boots up and wiped the dust off them all over a silk cushion, and looked up at the goddam ceiling and wished it would fall.
It wasn’t all that easy for Little God to let off steam. There was a full bottle of Teacher’s and a glass and two siphons, right to his hand, but Little God didn’t drink. And there were cigarettes and cigars and what not, but Little God didn’t smoke, not except after sex. When Little God was mad he wanted to break something.
After a while he got up and started thumbing through the first of the telephone books. There were thirty-four Angells, enough for a flaming heavenly host, but only one of them lived in Cadogan Mews. 26 Cadogan Mews, S.W.I. W. J. Angell, 331–9031. He stared at the book hot enough to make it burn, then fished out Flora’s A–Z. The place was quite close by to where he was, not ten minutes’ walk away. Ten minutes and he could go and beat up the house. Wreck it. Go in, force his way in and see her and then start breaking up the happy home. Mr and Mrs Angell. Send them up to heaven right away. Leave two corpses bleeding on the carpet and then go and pick Flora up from her bridge.
But by now it really was time to go and pick her up and he hadn’t even time to fill in all the dramatic picture. On impulse just before he left the room he picked up the phone book again and dialled 331–9031. It rang four times and then a man answered. He hung up and went out for the car.
He had to take Flora to Brighton next day so it was a week before he had time off again. The next Saturday it was, he strolled along and looked at Cadogan Mews. It was a classy enough neighbourhood, same sort as Wilton Crescent, and 26 was on the corner as the boy had said. Maybe the mews had been stables once, but that was in the days when horses got better treatment than people. And No. 26 was bigger than the others. She hadn’t married anyone like that red-faced nit at the dance. She’d married money, some weak-kneed fag with a voice like bed-springs creaking.
He propped himself up against the wall opposite and put a wad of chewing gum in his mouth. He chewed steadily for half an hour while there was no action. All the classy folk had gone off to their week-end cottages. Just now and then a solitary stroller would pass him or someone would come out and drive away in a shiny car. No action where he was interested.
He spat the chewing gum out and put in another wad. Just as he was about to give up in disgust a fat old man with a waistcoat like an oven door came out of 26 and walked off towards Cadogan Square. That was the end of activity but it encouraged him to wait a while longer. So half an hour later the fat man came back and this time Godfrey saw more of his face and realized he knew his face somewhere. Whether his picture had been in the papers or on telly or he’d been at some boxing tourney. As Godfrey walked back to Wilton Crescent the name Angell seemed to mean something to him too.
Late on Monday afternoon he tried again. There was no shop around where you could ask, so he went straight up to No. 24 and rang the bell and asked for Mr Angell.
A smart boy looking like a King’s Road boutique answered the door. ‘Mr Angell?’ he said, and looked at Godfrey as if he was something out of the drains. ‘Next door.’
‘It’s the young Mr Angell I want, see. Not the old man.’
‘Next door,’ he said. ‘No. 26.’ And shut the door in Godfrey’s face.
Godfrey spat on his doorstep and tried No. 22. No. 22 did not even know where Mr Angell lived, for Chrissake. So he thought it over and then tried across on the other corner from No. 26, No. 37.
A woman. Tarted and tinted and trying to look young which she never would be again except to a blind man with no arms.
‘Mr Angell? It’s opposite. The white house.’
‘It’s the young Mr Angell I want. Not the old man.’
‘There isn’t a young one – nor an old. Mr Wilfred Angell lives there.’
‘A – a stout gent?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I thought there was a young one.’
‘No, there’s only himself and his wife. He’s just newly married.’
Godfrey stared with his mouth half open and muttered something into his gum shield. Then just as he was turning away she had an idea. ‘It isn’t his servant you want, is it?’
‘Pardon?’
‘He used to have a servant called Alex Jones. He left about three months ago. Tall boy with a lot of dark hair and a sexy walk.’
It was lucky she couldn’t hear what Godfrey said then, but perhaps he did not look too loving because she shut the door quick. Little God was left alone in the hot street with the sun streaming down and just his thoughts for company.
Because it altered a lot. It altered the way he thought about her. Her marrying this fat rich old man. He could hardly believe it. It would have been bad enough marrying a rich young one.
It altered the way he thought about her. He’d thought she was different from the rest, more superior, something out of the top of the bag. But she was the same as all the rest. She’d turned him down because he hadn’t enough glue in his sock and sold herself to this fat merchant who was lousy with money. When he thought of that fat man pawing her he got goosepimples, and red spots floated.
But in one way it was better than a young man.
A few months ago she had almost been Little God’s girl. He had picked her out at a dance and driven her home. Then she’d come with him to Walworth Baths as his girl sitting there watching him box.
But she didn’t want Little God with all his manhood and fire in his belly; instead she went for this old heavyweight who could buy her diamonds and mink. The broad. The crummy stuck-up little broad.
Quite by accident a couple of days later Godfrey was looking at a picture of Venice in the hall at Wilton Crescent and he remembered where he had seen the fat man before. The fat man had called on Lady V a couple of months ago and had stopped to stare at this picture. Godfrey had opened the door for him and there he was, standing there in a suit that was first cousin to a draughtsboard and carrying a bunch of red roses. It was just after Flora had come out of her clinic.
So that night when he was playing rummy with Flora – she was having one of her off days – he brought up the subject in a roundabout way, and she told him who Mr Angell was.
‘This bloke I was with,’ Godfrey said, while the thumbscrews worked in his guts, ‘ this bloke says to me that this Mr Angell has just married a young girl, young enough to be his daughter. That right?’
‘That’s right. Some suburban miss he unexpectedly picked up with. No fool like an old fool. I went round last month to the reception he gave to introduce his blushing bride.’
‘When was this? I never drove you!’
‘No, it was that week you were in strict training after we came back from Cannes. I went by taxi while you were at your gym. There’s a run for you! I throw my knave and I’m out.’
Godfrey totted up how much he was down on the hand. ‘How old d’you reckon he is?’
‘Who?’
‘This Angell.’
‘Oh, just the right side of fifty, I should say. Of course she’s pretty enough in a rather sweet unanimated way. She was nervous at the party. One wonders what she is getting out of it. All his friends were absolutely astounded, I can assure you.’
‘Been married before?’
‘Wilfred? Heavens, no. Most of us thought he was a pansy.’
Little God watched her deal the next hand. Seven each. She made a click with each card. Her hands were strong but tapering and the nails had an orange coloured varnish on them.
‘Mind you, it has happened before,’ she said.
‘What has?’
‘An old queer gets rather past it, so he puts aside his boys and takes a wife so as to become one of the majority in later life.’
‘Think that’s the case with Angell?’
‘I wouldn’t know. He may have been a Don Juan all his life on the quiet … I’d hardly think so with all that weight. And anyway he’d be far too careful of his money!’
Godfrey thought afterwards it was strange how things turned out. He had been spar mate to Alf Manter two years ago before Alf hit the big time, and in September Alf was going to Boston to fight Joe O’Connor, and he thought he could persuade Cohen his manager to take one spar mate from this side for his three weeks’ training at Boston. It looked a great chance, and if Godfrey had got it he would have left Flora flat and maybe thought no more of Oyster and how he would have liked to look inside and find the Pearl.
But Cohen played around with the idea and then wouldn’t wear it, so it all came to nothing after all. This made Godfrey more frustrated than ever. Robins was useless and he was getting nowhere. And he would soon be getting to his peak now, age wise, and he hadn’t for ever to wait. He needed a manager who was in with the ring, the real promoters, not a small time push-over who just hung around their offices waiting for a word, and when he got it didn’t speak the same language.
So he was back with Flora V, and he had nothing to train for until maybe October when Robins was trying – and so far failing – to fix something up. So he thought more and more about Oyster and the closed shell and the Pearl inside. And he thought of W. J. Angell Esq. who had taken his girl. And of the firm of lawyers called Carey, Angell & Kingston where he worked. And of 26 Cadogan Mews only just round the corner from here. And he tried to think how he could put his spurs in. He tried to think how he could get in on their lives, how to keep the pot boiling, or maybe just simmering so that sooner or later Little God could get a taste of the soup.