As Far as You Can Go by Julian Mitchell Read Free Book Online

back-swing from someone’s entry. Carrying a piece of paper on which he had typed the latest cricket scores and all the runners and prices for the two o’clock at Sandown, he moved surely from desk to desk, talking blandly, then, to his great triumph, used Blackett’s own slipstream to depart. Never risking the lift on the way down, he took the fire-stairs. The only danger at the bottom was an open stretch of country to the main door. One of the architect’s particularly malignant gestures had been to leave no pillars in the foyer of the building. The back door led only into a dreary warren of dustbins and coal-holes which eventually brought one out a quarter of a mile from where Harold left his Lambretta.
    Assuming a serious business-like face, Harold strode meaningfully towards the door, then put on his bowler hat, pulling it down well over his face. In two minutes he was astride his Lambretta and in Cheapside, sliding through the gaps in the stalled traffic to emerge at the lights exactly as they changed from red to green.
    Ten minutes later he was in the Macaroon, talking toDennis Moreland who was already rather drunk. Moreland had been a contemporary of Harold’s at Oxford, and had since become a junior pundit on television and in the weeklies. He had read Law, as a matter of fact, but everyone assumed him to be a classical scholar, or at the very least a historian, since he gave his opinions with the air of a man who has read so much of the best literature that he can hardly bear to look at a book again. In fact he had read very little, and it was only because book-reviewing in the weeklies never extended beyond fifteen hundred words at most, and because one could get away with virtually anything on television provided one remained vague about details, that he had managed to remain undetected. Also, he was remarkably clever. Someone once described him as a machine for receiving other people’s ideas and turning them out to sound as though they were his own, but this was not quite the whole truth. He had a sort of originality that he was still exploring and testing, a way of seeing things which wasn’t quite like anyone else’s, and if what he saw was still what most other clever people saw, he described it in a vigorous yet clear style that was certainly his own. Without ever knowing quite enough of what he was talking about, he talked brilliantly and no one noticed the lacunae. And he thoroughly enjoyed cutting figures on the intellectual ice of his time, knowing better than anyone how thin it was. It was the knowledge that he was really something of a fraud that made him enjoy it so much, and his daring increased with the possibilities of detection.
    Harold liked him, without being quite sure why. Dennis was short and round, with a fat-cheeked face and light blue eyes under heavy black eyebrows, with thick black hair swept straight back to the nape of his neck. He treated Harold with a mixture of genial contempt and malicious friendliness, using him sometimes as a stooge and sometimes as an intimate companion. He had been married and divorced already, which at twenty-seven Harold considered unnecessarilysophisticated, and he was always accompanied by some exotic creature he’d found at the studios or met the night before at a party. Somehow, though, it was never the same exotic creature twice running, and Harold wondered whether his boasts of sexual prowess weren’t more fantasy than fact. At Oxford he had been deliberately Byronic, and the Don Juan attitude was still there in emergencies. An enemy had once told him to his face that he needed more buckle and less swash.
    “I’ve been telling the public about free love this afternoon ,” he said, plonking his drink on the table. “On tape, of course. I bet they cut it out. I did a marvellous spiel about Sweden and adolescent lust and adult suicide. No one will have the slightest idea which side I’m on.”
    “Have you ever been to Sweden?” said