Free Life Goes On by Alan Sillitoe Page A

comma. Now I can go out again, though not while you’re here. You’ll smoke the rest of my cigars. What did you really come for? I might be a writer, but I’m not a bally idiot.’
    â€˜I was on my way to Harrods to buy a waistcoat, and I nipped in on impulse.’
    â€˜A waistcoat? What colour?’
    â€˜A leather one.’
    â€˜Hmm! Not bad.’
    â€˜With horn buttons.’
    â€˜Better.’ Then he went back to being nasty. ‘And you thought you’d come here to disrupt me from my life’s work? You’d like to stop me writing the novel to end novels, wouldn’t you?’
    â€˜I expect it’s been done,’ I said, ‘fifty years ago.’
    â€˜That’s what you think.’ He threw his empty glass on the sofa. ‘I’d rather write a novel any day than a scholarly treatise on dumb insolence at the first Olympiad.’ He laughed. ‘But the thing is, Michael, my boy, I’ve got a commission to do something which is right up my street. A job wherein the research is going to take me to all the porn shops, strip clubs, lesbian hangouts, camp brothels, cat houses and underground cinemas in Soho. I can hardly believe it. I’ve just had a ten thousand pound advance to get started on it right away.’
    â€˜You fucking writers have all the luck.’
    â€˜I wish you wouldn’t swear,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing so charming as a working-class chap who doesn’t swear. But as soon as he swears you know he’s trying to pass himself off as middle-class. It sounds so uncouth. Mind you, I did swear when I was a young man, but it was only a happy-go-lucky fuck-this fuck-that sort of thing. I don’t do it anymore. It restricts my vocabulary.’
    â€˜Don’t tell me how to behave. But who’s commissioned you to write that book?’
    He chuckled. ‘A peer of the realm. One of your self-made salt of the earth boys from the provinces who are periodically ennobled so that they won’t cause more trouble to the body politic than they have to. He thinks he’s God’s gift to England because he has all the vice dens in the palm of his hand, and can be trusted not to let them get out of hand. He wants me to do his life story, a whitewash job if ever there was one. His wife read one of my novels, apparently, and didn’t like it, so he thought I was just the writer to do it. But if he thinks I’m going to get much mileage out of making him into little Saint Claud Mogger-donger he’s wrong. I’d much rather write the true story about him, except that I’ll save the real material for one of my later novels, though I suppose I’d better go to his ancestral Moggerhanger village in Bedfordshire to write a nice lyrical opening chapter on his antecedents and their hanging ground. There’s bound to be a gibbet or two I can go into raptures over, like Thomas Hardy. Why, Michael,’ he shouted when I ran into the bathroom, ‘have I said anything wrong? If I make you sick, you’ve made my day.’
    The cold porcelain of the toilet struck my forehead. I tried to throw up, but not a grain of bile would rise. The hammer of a metronome was going back and forth, a decade one way, and a decade the other. It wasn’t fear that turned my guts as much as that old familiar sensation of helplessness at being in the hands of fate. I tried to look on the bright side, but only a forty-watt light-bulb glowed. I couldn’t imagine what side-swipe of chance had brought Blaskin and Moggerhanger together, especially when, unknown to the former, one of the latter’s most wanted men was fretting in the attic above. I washed in cold water and, braving myself to meet whatever might come, went back to the living room.
    â€˜Did I say something wrong?’ Blaskin said, with malicious perkiness. ‘You look as pale as Little Dorrit, and you’re trembling like the Aspern Papers.