'Well I would.'
'You are funny, I keep telling you it's all pretend. Look love, I vote we pull up the drawbridge tonight. I know it's selfish of me but I don't honestly feel quite up to stirring out and that probably means I shouldn't, don't you think? Let's be absolute devils and have the heating on and huddle round the telly.'
So when the time came, Brenda went and sliced the chicken and made a salad and a dressing and got out the rather swarthy Brie that needed eating up and put it all on trays and brought them into the sitting-room. The TV was a colour set, small but all right for two. On it she and Jake watched episode 4 of 'Henry Esmond,' the News, including film of a minor air disaster in which a good half of those involved hadn't even been hurt, International Snooker, with a commentary that laid great stress on the desire of each player to score more points than the other and so win the match, World Outlook, which consisted largely of an interviewer in a spotted bow-tie being very rude to a politician about some aspect of nuclear energy and the politician not giving a shit, and Rendezvous with Terror: 'The Brass Golem.' Or rather Jake watched that far; Brenda gave up at the first soccer result and opened her Simon Raven paperback. At the start of the collegno violin passage advertising the approach of the rendezvous just alluded to, she got up from the sofa which she had herself covered with crimson velvet.
'You off, darling?' asked Jake. 'These things are always innocuous ballocks, you know. About as frightening as Donald Duck.'
'No, I'll be off anyway. Still the spare room?'
'I think while we're still sleeping badly.'
'Mm. Ooh, I'm sorry I didn't thank you properly for the chocolates.'
'The..... Oh yes. Oh, I thought you did.'
'If the scales aren't too bad in the morning I might treat myself to one tomorrow night. Well....'
'Good night, love.'
She bent and kissed him on the cheek and was gone. Jake washed down his Mogadon with some of his second glass of what was supposed to be claret. He was sorry now that he hadn't done what impulse and habit had suggested and told Brenda about the abortive wine-switch. Done properly the tale would have amused her, its confessional aspect given her pleasure, the row over the Mabbotts been prevented or disposed of, not merely broken off. But to have done it properly would have meant taking trouble, not much, true, but more than he had on the whole felt like taking at the time. Well there it is, he thought.
Despite everything the background bass clarinet could do, and it did indeed get a lot done in quantity, terror as expected failed altogether to turn up at the prearranged spot. Summoned by an ancient curse but otherwise unaccounted for, the metalloid protagonist ran his course in twenty minutes less commercials. His most mysterious endowment was the least remarked: that of always coming upon his quarry alone, out of sight and hearing of everyone else, in a blind alley, in a virtually endless tunnel, in a room with only one door and no usable window, etc. He ground to a halt finally through gross overheating of the lubricants in the Turkish bath where Providence, in the form of total chance, had led his last intended victim to take refuge. Very neat.
As he went round the room turning everything off, Jake reconstructed the brief script conference at which the creative producer had outlined the story to his colleagues. 'Right,' he snarled, stabbing at the air with an invisible cigar to point the turns in his argument, 'got this guy made of like brass, see, buried somewheres for a coin's age, okay, comes like an earthquake or explosion or whatever, right, anyways he done get gotten dug up, see, this old like parchment says any motherfucker digs me up gets to done get gotten fucked up good, okay, he fucks up three—four guys around, right, chases the last guy into somewhere fucking hot, see, now the brass guy done gotten oil like instead of blood, okay, so 'he' gets to done get gotten fucked up, right, Zeke and Zack get on it right away, see, they don't get to done get gotten done it by tomorrow, they lose their asses, okay, and any number of cunts all over the world who know a bloody sight better will watch the bloody thing. Right.'
Upstairs, Jake unhurriedly cleaned his teeth and peed, feeling a comfortable drowsiness at the edge of his mind. Light showed under Brenda's door: she liked to read for a time before settling off, which he didn't. He went into the spare room and undressed. There were pictures in here no less than everywhere else, most of them non- modern black-and-white unoriginals; in almost every case he could have said whether or not a given one belonged to the house but he would never have missed any of them. He put on his pyjamas, turned off the light and was about to get into bed, then changed his mind and went to the window.
Looking out, he remembered with no great vividness doing the same thing one night some shortish time after Brenda and he had come to live here. Then as now there had been plenty to see, mainly by the street-lamp that stood no more than twenty yards off: houses, trees, bushes, parked cars, the bird-table in the garden diagonally opposite. Then, too, some of the windows must have been illuminated and it was quite possible that, as now, the only sounds had been faint voices and distant footsteps. After some effort he remembered further his feelings of curiosity, almost of expectation, as if he might find himself seeing a link between that moment and things that had happened earlier in his life. He remembered, or thought he did; there was no question of his re- experiencing those feelings, nor of his wishing he could. What was before him left him cold, and he didn't mind.
4—Thunderball
The next Tuesday morning when Jake set off down Burgess Avenue it was raining, but not very hard. Even if it had been very hard he would have more or less had to set off just the same. Four or five years ago there had been a taxi-rank at the end of the High Street by St Winifred's Hospital and a telephone-call fetched one to the front door within a few minutes in any weather. The sign and the shelter were still there but they served only to trap the occasional stranger into a fruitless wait. Minicabs either didn't come or had drivers you had to pilot street by street to places like Piccadilly Circus. And there was the expense. And the Underground was only worth while for long journeys, over the river or out to Chelsea: Jake had established that 47 Burgess Avenue NW16 was about as equidistant as anywhere could be from the stations at Golders Green, East Finchley, Highgate and Hampstead. He had several times read, though not recently, of plans to extend one or other branch of the Northern Line to a contemplated Kenwood Station in the 1980s.
Every 6-7 mins was how often 127s were supposed to turn up at the stop by the Orris Park Woolworths, so to be given the choice of two after only 10-11 was rather grand and certainly welcome in the increasing rain and squirts of cold wind. Jake got on to the second bus, one of the newish sort distinguished by a separate entrance and exit. The doors closed after him with a swish of compressed air that resembled to what was almost a worrying degree the sound of the off-licence bugger and his overalled customer saying Cheers to each other. The conductor too was one of the newish sort, which in this case meant that he chucked you off if you hadn't got the exact money. But Jake made a great point of not being caught out by things like that.
Whenever he could he liked to sit at the back on the offside, where there was a niche just wide enough for an umbrella between the emergency door and the arm of the seat, but someone from Asia was there that morning so he took the corresponding position upstairs. Among the people he had a good or fair view of, there was none he remembered having seen before. They were divided, as well they might have been, into those older than him, round about his age and younger than him. In different ways all three groups got him down a bit. Only one child seemed to be about the place but it was making a lot of noise, talking whenever it felt like it and at any volume it fancied. Far from admonishing or stifling it, its mother joined in, talked back to it. Like a fool he had forgotten to bring anything to read.
