‘That your father?’
‘No.’ He grinned. ‘It was Granddad. It dates from 1885, and Toole’s Theatre stood on this very spot. The old guy was on the halls there.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘A Zep got him and Grandma in 1916. Jerry bastards.’
‘Bastards.’ We could agree about something anyway. Suddenly he reached into a trouser pocket, and from it handed me a half-crown.
‘Buy your old man that pint from me. Tell him it was bloody funny.’
I gave him a little salute, then turned and got out of there while I was still ahead.
I crossed the Thames on the walkway running alongside Hunger-ford Bridge, and got caught in a November squall halfway across. My old American raincoat no longer kept out the rain the way it did years ago, so it was a damp Charlie who dropped anchor alongside his father in a dirty little pub on the corner of Stamford Street. The receptionist at the club had taken pity on me, and told me where to find him.
The old man didn’t even look round when I took the stool alongside him. He said, ‘You took your time.’
‘I’m not bloody psychic, Dad. You could have told me you were in trouble.’
‘I wasn’t in trouble, son. I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to do.’
‘That’s what I was afraid of. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?’
‘Only after you’ve set up the beer. You’re so bloody slow to put your hand in your pocket I sometimes think you were fathered by a Yorkshireman.’
‘Maybe I just take after you.’
After a couple of rounds he said, ‘I just didn’t want to embarrass you.’
‘Don’t ever worry about that. I embarrass myself far more than you ever could.’ The words didn’t come out in exactly the right order, but he understood me.
‘You know I ain’t scared of doing my bit, Charlie?’
‘Yes?’ Doing his bit had included soldiering through the First War from start to finish as a Pioneer, and then joining up again in 1945 to help the British Army dig holes all over Holland and Germany.
‘I got fed up with it, that’s all.’
‘Fed up with Glasgow?’
‘No, don’t be daft. Why should anyone get fed up with Glasgow? – it has the best boozers in the world.’ I didn’t know if he meant the pubs or the people in them, so I kept shtum, and let him finish what he’d started. ‘I got fed up with the war.’
‘Which one?’
‘All of them. Malaya, Korea and now bloody Kenya . . . it’s never-bloody-ending. We can’t be at war for ever: it’s got to stop somewhere. My war was supposed to be the war to end wars, remember?’
‘What brought this on?’
‘Mrs Johnson did.’
‘Mrs Johnson?’
‘She’s a nice widow who lives underneath me.’ He had a redbrick tenement flat. But that was interesting: I hadn’t heard him mention her before. ‘They called her son up last month. He’s only seventeen, and he already knows he’s off to Kenya after his basic: fucking Kenya is not worth fighting for – it was the last straw.’
‘What about all the coffee?’
‘What’s wrong with a bottle of old Camp coffee? . . . Anyway I thought that someone had got to do something about it, so I decided to go down to the Cenotaph and tell the bastards a few home truths about fighting and dying for your country. I thought I might get in the papers.’ What was wrong with Camp coffee was that it wasn’t coffee at all, but I wasn’t prepared to contradict him.
‘Did it work?’
‘No. Everyone ignored me, so I started to sing.’
‘What?’
‘I sang “They’ll never believe me”, and a couple of others. We had some soldiers’ verses for them in my day. That’s when the cops got nasty.’
‘The desk sergeant at Agar Street gave me half a crown to buy you a pint. He said it was bloody funny.’
‘The magistrate said, “Even if I was to sympathize with you, Mr Bassett, I could not condone your disrespect to our young sovereign. You are to consider yourself formally admonished.” What do you think he meant by that?’
‘He agreed with you, of course, but he wasn’t going to say so. So did the copper; that’s why he asked me to buy you a pint. You might have started something after all.’
‘Do you think so?’ He brightened up a bit. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’
‘They called me up again, Dad. They want me to go to Egypt.’
‘Bollocks!’
At least my father and I had reached a stage where we had a vocabulary in common.
We got drunk. Until his dying day my father was a better drinker than me. We slept back to back on his bed at the Club, like a married couple who were no longer talking.
The next day I went back to Lympne-sur-mer, which is where the airline I worked for was based.
My secretary Elaine said, ‘I’m sorry, Charlie,’ as soon as I walked in. I just gave her the look, went through to my office and shut the door. Firmly. One of the few things I’d learned about the women who liked me is that they could stand anything except being denied access. They needed to see my face, as if from that they could work out what was going on upstairs. Elaine had a son who was three now, and I was his godfather. It was only by the grace of God that I hadn’t become the real thing. She had had no more children, and her figure and looks had come back with a bang – forgive the pun. I still fancied her like mad, but the only times we had touched since her boy was born was when she handed me a mug of char. Anyway, I’d met her old man and liked him, so that complicated things.
I gave her ten minutes before she’d try again. She came in after just seven,
