glasses, and, with more care than was necessary, filled each to the brim. While we watched him I saw Frazer reach out for the packet of cigarettes that the landlord had left on the counter. He helped himself. There was an intimacy to such a liberty.
‘Can I buy a bottle?’ asked Ferdy.
‘You can not,’ said MacGregor.
I sipped it. It was a soft smoky flavour of the sort that one smelled as much as tasted.
Frazer poured his whisky into the beer and drank it down. ‘You damned heathen,’ said the landlord. ‘And I’m giving you the twelve-year-old malt too.’
‘It all ends up in the same place, Mr MacGregor.’
‘You damned barbarian,’ he growled, relishing the r’s rasp. ‘You’ve ruined my ale and my whisky too.’
I realized it was a joke between them, one that they had shared before. I knew that Lieutenant Frazer was from RN security. I wondered if the landlord was a part of it too. It would be a fine place from which to keep an eye on strangers who came to look at the atomic submarines at the anchorage.
And then I was sure that this was so, for Frazer picked up the packet of cigarettes from which he’d been helping himself. The change of ownership had been a gradual one but I was sure that something more than cigarettes was changing hands.
2
In games where the random chance programme is not used, and in the event of two opposing units, of exactly equal strength and identical qualities, occupying same hex (or unit of space), the first unit to occupy the space will predominate.
RULES. ‘TACWARGAME’. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON
The London flight was delayed.
Ferdy bought a newspaper and I read the departures board four times. Then we drifted through that perfumed limbo of stale air that is ruled by yawning girls with Cartier watches, and naval officers with plastic briefcases. We tried to recognize melodies amongst the rhythms that are specially designed to be without melody, and we tried to recognize words among the announcements, until finally the miracle of heavier-than-air flight was once again mastered.
As we climbed into the grey cotton wool, we had this big brother voice saying he was our captain and on account of how late we were there was no catering aboard but we could buy cigarette lighters with the name of the airline on them, and if we looked down to our left side we could have seen Birmingham, if it hadn’t been covered in cloud.
It was early evening by the time I got to London. The sky looked bruised and the cloud no higher than the high-rise offices where all the lights burned. The drivers were ill-tempered and the rain unceasing.
We arrived at the Studies Centre in Hampstead just as the day staff were due to leave. The tapes had come on a military flight and were waiting for me. There is a security seal when tapes are due, so we unloaded to the disapproving stares of the clock-watchers in the Evaluation Block. It was tempting to use the overnight facilities at the Centre: the bathwater always ran and the kitchen could always find a hot meal, but Marjorie was waiting. I signed out directly.
I should have had more sense than to expect my car to sit in the open through six weeks of London winter and be ready to start when I needed it. It groaned miserably as it heaved at the thick cold oil and coughed at the puny spark. I pummelled the starter until the air was choked with fumes, and then counted to one hundred in an attempt to keep my hands off her long enough to dry the points. At the third bout she fired. I hit the pedal and there was a staccato of backfire and judder of one-sided torque from the oldest plugs. Finally they too joined the song and I nudged her slowly out into the evening traffic of Frognal.
If the traffic had been moving faster I would probably have reached home without difficulty, but the sort of jams you get on a wet winter’s evening in London gives the coup de grâce to old bangers like mine. I was just a block away from my old place in Earl’s Court when she died. I opened her up and tried to decide where to put the Band-aid, but all I saw were raindrops sizzling on the hot block. Soon the raindrops no longer sizzled and I became aware of the passing traffic. Big expensive all-weather tyres were filling my shoes with dirty water. I got back into the car and stared at an old packet of cigarettes, but I’d given them up for six weeks and this time I was determined to make it stick. I buttoned up and walked down the street as far as the phone box. Someone had cut the hand-piece off and taken it home. Not one empty cab had passed in half an hour. I tried to decide between walking the rest of the way home and lying down in the middle of the road. It was then that I remembered that I still had the door-key of the old flat.
The Studies Centre was turning my lease over the following month. Possibly the phone was still connected. It was two minutes’ walk.
I rang the doorbell. There was no answer. I gave it an extra couple of minutes, remembering how often I’d failed to hear it from the kitchen at the back. Then I used the old key and let myself in. The lights still worked. I’d always liked number eighteen. In some ways it’s more to my taste than the oil-fired slab of speculator’s bad taste that I’d exchanged it for, but I’m not the sort of fellow who gives aesthetics precedence over wall-to-wall synthetic wool and Georgian-style double-glazing.
The flat wasn’t the way I’d left it. I mean, the floor wasn’t covered with Private Eye and Rolling Stone, with strategically placed carrier bags brimming with garbage. It was exactly the way it was when the lady next door came in to clean it three times a week. The furniture wasn’t bad, not bad for a furnished place, I mean. I sat down in the best armchair and used the phone. It worked. I dialled the number of the local mini-cab company and was put up for auction. ‘Anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham?’ Then, ‘Will anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with twenty-five pence on the clock?’ Finally some knight of the road deigned to do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with seventy-five pence on the clock if I’d wait half an hour. I knew that meant forty-five minutes. I said yes and wondered if I’d still be a non-smoker had I slipped that pack into my overcoat.
If I hadn’t been so tired I would have noticed what was funny about the place the moment I walked in. But I was tired. I could hardly keep my eyes open. I’d been sitting in the armchair for five minutes or more when I noticed the photo. At first there was nothing strange about it, except how I came to leave it behind. It was only when I got my mind functioning that I realized that it wasn’t my photo. The frame was the same as the one I’d bought in Selfridges Christmas Sale in 1967. Inside was almost the same photo: me in tweed jacket, machine washable at number five trousers, cor-blimey hat and two-tone shoes, one of them resting on the chromium of an Alfa Spider convertible. But it wasn’t me. Everything else was the same – right down to the number plates – but the man was older than me and heavier. Mind you, I had to peer closely. We both had no moustache, no beard, no sideboards and an out-of-focus face, but it wasn’t me, I swear it.
I didn’t get alarmed about it. You know how crazy things can sound, and then along comes a logical, rational explanation – usually supplied by a woman very close to you. So I didn’t suddenly panic, I just started to turn the whole place over systematically. And then I could scream and panic in my own good, leisurely, non-neurotic way.
What was this bastard doing with all the same clothes that I had? Different sizes and some slight changes, but I’m telling you my entire wardrobe. And a photo of Mr Nothing and Mason: that creepy kid who does the weather print-outs for the war-games. Now I was alarmed. It was the same with everything in the flat. My neck-ties. My chinaware. My bottled Guinness. My Leak hi-fi, and my Mozart piano concertos played by my Ingrid Haebler. And by his bed – covered with the same dark green Witney that I have on my bed – in a silver frame: my Mum and Dad. My Mum and Dad in the garden. The photo I took at their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.
I sat myself down on my sofa and gave myself a talking-to. Look, I said to myself, you know what this is, it’s one of those complicated jokes that rich people play on each other in TV plays for which writers can think of no ending. But I haven’t got any friends rich and stupid enough to want to print me in duplicate just to puzzle me.