Three Wogs

by Alexander Theroux

  “How’s your cup?” Mrs. Proby asked.

  “I’m doing nicely, thank you,” answered Mrs. Cullinane, whose character was basically that of blotting paper: passive, receptive, and ready for the strangest of Rohrshachs, notwithstanding those patterns of peculiarity soaked up by the thrust and imposition of Mrs. Proby’s iron will and irrevocable opinion.

  “These teacakes want jam,” Mrs. Proby said.

  “Mine are fine.”

  “You’re having your teacake, then?”

  “Oh yes, I merely put it aside.”

  “I noticed you did. I wondered why you did.”

  “I had a scone.”

  “But not a teacake.” Mrs. Proby looked away.

  “I thought I’d have it in a minute.”

  “Have it now.”

  Mrs. Cullinane bit into the cake trimly. “It’s delicious.”

  “It wants jam.”

  Mrs. Proby, the recent terror of the unpropitiously topical film fast and irksome in her mind, suddenly bolted from the sofa, threw open the door of the living room, and, pointing to her pursed lips as a quick sign for secrecy and immediate silence, scuttled to the keyhole of the main entrance-hall door. She squatted, applied her ear, and peeped through, her right hand raised as a flat warning to a bewildered Mrs. Cullinane who followed her in soft, querulous hops, sucking a finger in fright. Glances were exchanged. Nothing. They mooned back into the room for a second cup. Mrs. Proby poured: “You’re white.”

  “Lovely, and, I think, a twinkle of milk.” Mrs. Cullinane, mouse-mannered and votively appreciative, watched the sacrament and took her cup and saucer as the last word in the way of viaticum.

  “Spoons?”

  “Two, dear.”

  “Level or heaped?”

  “Heaped.”

  “Then one.”

  “One?”

  One, Mrs. Proby mouthed, silently pronouncing the word as she nodded once, conveying, as she fully intended, the readily identifiable world-weariness of Authority Taxed. Her eyes shut with a little snap.

  Mrs. Cullinane’s Lucullan urges were an embarrassment to herself. She blushed for being such a hog and looked away absent-mindedly at a fuchsia marinescape of the pebble beaches at Rottingdean crookedly hung on a far wall.

  “I don’t mind telling you,” Mrs. Proby continued, smoothing her round, lacteal figure, “he scares me right out of my naturals, and, mind you, he’s been acting strange for quite some time now. He lights incense sticks at night, worships the devil, I think. I don’t know if he’s grinding tea or muttering A-rab chants, I don’t, but I turn my wireless up so as not to hear, you see. What I’m driving at, Mrs. Cullinane, is this: some morning Mrs. Proby’s going to turn back the covers, take off her hairnet, and find she’d shoulder-to-shin with the Yellow Peril, she is.

  “The Yellow Peril?”

  “You might have read about it, all those little cities near San Francisco, America, are up in arms over it, catching it as fast as nightingales and flopping down with writhe all over their mouths from it, poor things.”

  Mrs. Cullinane was heartbroken. “Honestly, with all the riots here and space trips there, then the whole African mess, you wonder if people have left their heads home.”

  “Oh, it’s all monkey-see, monkey-do, isn’t it?” Mrs. Proby said, sipping her tea and swallowing in the middle of an important thought. “Mmmm,” she quickly recovered, “the point is, when I look around me to see who’s there, I don’t want to see yellows or browns or purples. I want mine.”

  A wistful smile passed over Mrs. Cullinane’s face and she patted Mrs. Proby’s wrist with earnest compassion, adding with sincere force and a cross between a prophetic stare and a wink, “You’ll get yours.” She closed her eyes and nodded confidently.

  The ladies understood each other, in the careful way that ladies do once they understand each other. They were rather a pair than a couple, supporting each other from day to day, rather a set of utile, if ill-matched, bookends between which stood the opinion and idea in the metaphorical volumes that both connected them and kept them ever apart. Mrs. Proby and Mrs. Cullinane met each other as the result of a coincidence which proved their similarity, perhaps even to a perfection or symmetry we would never be ready to accord even to types. The meeting took place in the lending library branch at Balls Green: both ladies, waiting at the “request desk,” had asked the librarian—almost in unison—for a copy of The Sinister Monk by Raoul Carrambo. Laughter, embarrassment, and that became for them the point of departure for a parallel life-style they had cherished for a long while now. But the relationship was greatly strengthened in the two when, after a few off-hand discussions over tea and during walks, they began to realize they held common beliefs in politics, entertainment, and the public weal. Neither could understand why Mrs. Shoe, a third party (initially a friend of Mrs. Cullinane, Mrs. Proby often felt the need to make clear) who worked as a saleslady selling velveteen at D. H. Evans in Oxford Street, was so unwilling to abhor the immigration problem. Voluntary Repatriation was the answer. One had to be purblind not to see that.

  Mrs. Proby never could come to terms with the fact that Indians, Chinese, or Blacks even bothered to get on boats and travel thousands and thousands of miles to England—eating only peas and peppercorn or playing mah-jongg or jacks in steerage with all the chickens—when they should have known that the day would certainly come when people would be jumping off into the ocean for want of room, run screaming off into the Highlands for a gulp of air, or begin selling their hair just to keep alive. This was why Mrs. Proby always met Mrs. Cullinane at the door, saying, “Cor, good to see a human face.”

  Then, there chanced to happen the fully reported melee at the Chinese Embassy, with blow-up photographs in the Daily Mail of hissing, spitting ambassadors armed with cricket bats, flatirons, and pinking shears, while the British police were left with only dust-bin covers to protect themselves. It was only a matter of time, as matters go, therefore, that Mrs. Proby began to notice many Chinese on the streets: hunched, shuffling, dry-mannered, and recondite in that carapax of the inaccessible and unproven. Mrs. Proby immediately bought a screw and lock for her door.

  “So I got all fired up and carried away,” Mrs. Proby said, plucking a tea leaf off the tip of her tongue, “when I saw this absolutely perverse Chinee with a hat like a black upside-down cup with a nipple on it and a moustache like two long pieces of dirty licorice hanging from his nose. I thought of Mr. Yunnum Fun, so help me dearie. And you would have done, too.”

  “Was it all blood and gore?”

  “Who stayed for the end to watch, me? Not likely. I suppose I should have, strange to say, then I could have told you the whole give and take, you see.” A pause: Mrs. Cullinane pulled the lobe of her ear, reflected.

  “Mr. Yunnum Fun doesn’t have a moustache.”

  “He has white hairs growing out of his ears, like artichokes. It sounds to me like you’re defending him.”

  Mrs. Cullinane swerved her shoulders in nonchalance. “He walks around in slippers.”

  “He wears pajamas, too.”

  “But he doesn’t wear a Chinese hat.”

  “So you defend him.”

  “I’m not defending him.”

  “It sounds to me like you’re defending him. What does it sound like to you?”

  What is a pair, it seemed proven only once again, is not who is a couple.

  Mrs. Proby assumed the pain-of-the-unseen-wound expression, stood up, took a cigarette from her pack, and tapped it on her knuckle. She mentally envisioned a piece of black cardboard from which she sharply cut a cruel profile of Yunnum Fun, thinking of his petty insults and bumptious insularity. She puffed out circles of smoke and let loose, between the blue swirls, a not-uncommon antagonism, syncopated with hot flashes: part bigotry, part haptic bias.

  “I suppose it’s perfectly normal for the Chinese to come over here without so much as shoe flap, go on National Health, have babies for a song, buy spectacles for less th
an cost, get free teeth, and then just because everything’s not all cozy and done up like a nice package from Father Christmas, frills and froo-froo and all, go out into the street and kick those handsome policemen in the kneecaps. And all the while our own have to make do with bits and pieces. Who wouldn’t have bad dreams? It raises my hump, Mrs. Cullinane. It should raise yours.”

  “It raises my hump,” Mrs. Cullinane apologized.

  “When?”

  “Just now, dear.”

  “You’re just saying that because it raised my hump,” said Mrs. Proby, an avocadine hue rising into her ample neck. Mrs. Cullinane turned cinnabar red. The colours clashed.

  “I mean, let’s face it, we should take care of our own first, shouldn’t we? Give us a few years and we’ll have books that you have to read backwards, and our children will have to write with nails manufactured in China and make those peculiar words with wings and splinters and god knows what, won’t we?” asked Mrs. Proby, who, unbeknownst to her, had one of the grouts from the bottom of the teacup on the tip of her nose. “If you don’t find that peculiar, Mrs. Cullinane, you’re off your rails, spade to spade.”

  Mrs. Cullinane clucked, sipped the last of her tea, and placed the thin, blue-striped cup on the saucer in her lap, dabbed her lips daintily with a napkin, and drew her finger down each side of her open mouth which she smacked as an indication that tea for her was now over. She placed the sacramentals on the server, stood up, adjusted the jacket of her herringbone suit. “Lovely, dear. Just tickety-boo.”

  “Have yourself another teacake.”

  “Godfrey,” said Mrs. Cullinane, making a clown face. “I’m full up.”

  “Tomorrow night, then, for the ham.”

  Mrs. Cullinane, head inclined and little hands joined, was smiling vacantly at her little buttoned feet. She looked like Squirrel Nutkin. She might have been asleep. Then she looked up slowly, depositing her eyes into Mrs. Proby’s and quickly bumping out of her reverie. She grew pursy, flutterful. “Tomorrow night, then, for the—?”

  “Ham.” Mrs. Proby sniffed. “My ham supper.”

  Mrs. Cullinane formed her hand into a pistol and aimed a finger at her temple; she crossed her eyes, lolled her tongue, and displayed, with jangling arms and a dizzy expression, her silly lapse of memory. Forgetfulness for her was a merciful narcotic. “Of course, dear.” she burbled.

  “Dumplings, as well.”

  “Lovely, dear. And so thoughtful. You see, you remembered. I can’t eat apples as they come from the tree; the crunch goes right through me. I have a thin windpipe. You see, the pips are murder and—”

  “I don’t core my apples,” Mrs. Proby interrupted. “I won’t have it. Pips impart a delicious flavour to dumplings. I thought you knew that.” Cored apples not only made a mock of the natural apple, they made a mock of Mrs. Proby who never fixed them that way. “You want to think about your kitchen, Mrs. Cullinane.”

  Mrs. Cullinane was thinking about her windpipe.

  Mrs. Proby was not given to “adventurous cooking.” True, ten years ago, in a mad fit of what then seemed an unquenchable obsession with experiment, she did once pull her bread, for a cheese lunch. But cooking, especially in England, was not a question of miracles. And even if she hated eyeing potatoes and making béchamel, she knew what work meant. One does not just throw a bun up in the air, as she often rather realistically pointed out, and expect it to come down pig-in-the-blanket. Good English dishes, sweet and short! And there was an end to it. All the so-called snappy puddings, camel meat, weevily flour, cut-and-come-again cheeses, expensive chocolates, and powdered soup-and-fish preparations all shot up with additives sunk into one’s stomach like a bump in a trash bin and insured hardening of the arteries, for one thing, and squammes, for another. She loved a steaming joint, a bowl of fresh cock-a-leekie soup, and especially liked her brussel sprouts hard, where they stood up and came green in a minute, after which, of course, a few spoonfuls of figgy pudding to top it all off. She was, after all, an islander. Islanders had to know what to eat, because any minute the Communists, those hoof-footed dongs from the primeval wastes who live only on smudgy black aerated bread and complaints, would be swimming around the whole nation with corking and nets in their mouths, sealing Great Britain off from the rest of the world, and forcing everyone into a diet of cowpats, the lesser sage, and ounces of mastick. As if life were all clover! Islanders, also, knew about fish, and Mrs. Proby often found herself, in the midst of a somnambulistic stroll in the middle of the night, voraciously gripping the door of the fridge with both hands, a volcanic lust in her mind for a nice hake, turbot, brill, some whiting, or, best of all, a slice of John Dory, which had her favourite piece on the cheek. And then, if she was knocked in, maybe a nice little Pimm’s Cup—just before Bedfordshire—to ease the rheumatics and start her off again on her beauty slumber. Beauty, she often reminded herself, was important as well. You never knew.

  Curatical in her bugled wool, Mrs. Proby bore regally a large teapot toward her small kitchen. Mrs. Cullinane champed down on a napkin to see a trace of lipstick, fixed her hair in a wall mirror, and fidgeted into her fur-tipped seal boots. She turned toward the kitchen. “May I pluck a rose?”

  Wringing her arms of water, Mrs. Proby came back into the room in the midst of a monologue which she had begun with her dog in the kitchen. “... featherbedded and all. If it was up to me, I’d throw out the whole ruddy lot. Sorry?”

  “I have to spend a penny.”

  “The bottom of the hall. You know.” She paused, coddling the stanchion of her left breast from heartburn. “The bathroom stationery is in the cabinet, with a rubber around it. The bugs were ruining the t.p. That’s why you will smell pepper in the convenience, Mrs. Cullinane. Don’t let it stop you from your business. I sprinkle pepper there, for the bugs.” She snorted out with a cruel little chuckle. “They hate it.” She indicated an unlighted passageway off the living room, through which Mrs. Cullinane poked, feeling the walls for surety. Mrs. Proby splayed herself in a chair, stretched her feet wide apart, and pinched lovingly the wattles of her dog, both staring into space. The identifiable sound of a loud gurgle and splash pulled her from her revery. Mrs. Cullinane re-entered smiling.

  “You remember, of course, the la-de-da in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Mrs. Cullinane. A fine figger for the children here and about, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Proby sucked a tooth.

  “Oh yes,” Mrs. Cullinane said dryly. “That Chinaman.”

  “I thought you forgot.”

  “How could I forget?”

  “I thought you forgot.”

  “How could I forget?”

  “After I just reminded you, you couldn’t, Mrs. Cullinane; there’s no point in fibbing.”

  The reference here was to an unfortunate incident that took place about a fortnight before the confrontation at the Chinese Embassy and which prompted Mrs. Proby, despite Mrs. Cullinane’s protestations that the man in question might have been Japanese, to write to Downing Street a singularly outraged letter, notable, perhaps, most of all for its insinuation that an insidious collaboration was taking place, known to few but the initiated and politically aware, between the British Civil Service and Red China. “Watch the feathers fly,” Mrs. Proby prophesied.

  Mrs. Proby and Mrs. Cullinane took advantage of the English year and its rosary of annual events: the Annual Spital Sermon, Oak-Apple Day, Swan Upping, the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Greaze, and the Presentation of the Knolly Rose. And Mrs. Proby and Mrs. Cullinane loved to go to museums as well. They loved tapestries, the century-old costumes, and delicate bone china. Mrs. Cullinane could never get over the intricacy of the Eye-talian designs which she herself could never hope to duplicate in a thousand million years, she said. Mrs. Proby said it took her mind off herself. It was on Egg Saturday one lovely afternoon in spring and a fresh rain had left the streets clean and the air bright for a good walk to the Victoria and Albert. But no sooner had they passed the Jones Collection and were making their way through
to the tapestries, with determined and mechanical clockwork steps, they happened to pass a chunky man (a Thai) huddled in a greasy overcoat, sitting on a small bench before the elongated, sensual sculpture called “Reclining Nymph.” His hands were fumbling in his lap (a rubbing friction to restore warmth). Mrs. Proby, biting her lip and inquisitorial, nudged Mrs. Cullinane, dragged her away behind some eighteenth-century French busts in a corner, and, her back to the room, squinted past Mrs. Cullinane’s shoulders while gesturing with her thumb over her own, in the direction of the man. They bustled over to the room guard and explained in euphemistically vague but excited terms that a Chinaman in that same room was drooling and manipulating himself, and, by way of footnote, they stood around and painted a few word-pictures which included various suppositions, not the least of which was that it was the Queen Mother’s favourite room and that, horresco referens, the Archbishop of Canterbury might be coming into the museum any minute.

  It was getting dark outside. Mrs. Cullinane stopped at the door and smiled sweetly. She squeezed Mrs. Proby’s elbow and turned her head to one side in compassion. She started down the stairs, turned on the landing, and spoke. “Keep your pecker up, dear.”