Which, a delicate boy, had been raised by three nannies, all of whom looked like Mrs. Danvers—bunhaired, always dressed in bombazine, weird—and one of whom, on a train to Goole one rainy weekend, hastily and for no apparent reason put aside the complete volume of the rhythmoids of Nurse Lovechild, from which she had been reading aloud, and began discussing in a fit of sudden letch her “enormous diddeys.” Later, it was brought to light in Bow Street General Court that she also tried to touch his “watering can” (sic). Spread abroad, this came to be known infamously, and looked back upon traumatically, as The Georgie Quaiff Incident (a name Dame Rehabilitation, in her infinite mercy, willingly altered for the poor jade’s passport when she was rusticated to Australia the following week). But the tabloids had had a field day.
The boy was immediately posted, with a bag of sweets, a new pair of wellies, and his late father’s interlinear Caesar, to an Anglican seminary in out-of-the-way Wem, Shropshire, where, it was hoped, he would come to look with horror on his first and hopefully last bout with genial carnality, guided by the Deanery of high repute there whose good example and instruction, it was said, would instantly mould and bake his volition from the moist ceramic it was into the Graecian Urn it should be. It took the eminent divine, Dr. Lushington—a prefect as old as the pre-Wren St. Paul’s—no more than three months to tap his supply of angelic energies and decide for the lad that he had a vocation; it was then ordered that Which should be thanked and encouraged in this blessed, if factitious, decision to serve God, Whose emanations, it should be equally pointed out, caused minor, but unsettling, religious questions in the boy, and before the full Charismon, mandala of the Christians, could be imprinted on his soul with any degree of force, certain quodlibetical worries had to be resolved:
1. When Mass is being said at two ends of a church, where precisely is the Holy Ghost?
2. Was God the Father too embarrassed to become Man?
3. Had Eve a navel?
4. When Christ said “Teach my Gospel unto every creature,” was the non-restrictive term intentional, viz., life on other planets?
5. May one pray to St. Polycarp and never be distracted by the name?
6. If the Monastery of St. Medard of Soissons has a tooth of Our Lord and the Abbey of Our Lady of Sudden Gladness the prepuce, then is He, in fact, fully risen?
7. Was Adam a hermaphrodite?
8. What are we to think of the Totality of the Godhead, given the fact that the Paraclete clearly might have moulted?
9. What tongue was spoken by Adam and Eve in the paradisiacal triangle with the serpent? Micmac? Rarotongan? Shelta?
10. Were the spittle curatives mentioned in the New Testament (a) less efficacious if administered from afar, or (b) ever—a curious paradox—fatally bacteritic?
Time passed. Which Therefore studied hard, won the approval of the faculty, and, some years later, was sent up to Oxford (BNC) to do his Austins, where he took a respectable Second (with thanks to St. Frideswide, patron saint of stout-hearted Oxonians and the Old Boy network) with his highly readable hagiography, Saints Preserve Us, later followed by its companion volume, Saints Alive, critically acclaimed both (“... two scrupulously honest reassessments ...”), then illustrated and abridged as Puffins for general use in schoolrooms all over the British Isles.
Lady Therefore was firm on one point, however: he was not to be sent to Africa, for, her husband’s death aside—she was trying to be objective—she had heard stories from the very missionaries who survived that colour-blindness was inevitable, women didn’t know the meaning of underpinnings, and for Mass the foolish nig-nogs did nothing but suck grass, bite chinch-bugs, and transubstantiate stones.
Subsequently, Which was anointed, ordained, and, circumscribed with neither debts nor wifely compromises, eventually given a parish in London. When he heard of his incumbency (coincident with a contribution Lady Therefore had sent to the Bishop), he decided to jump at the chance, for this was a rather special church: St. Peter Perpendicular, the church known internationally for its reliquary, where on display were a pair of slippers worn by Enoch before the Flood; the thumb of Anastasius the Cornicular; the coalrake that was used to broil St. Lawrence; one of the columns Christ had leaned against in the Temple; the stone pried from the forehead of Goliath; and a not inconsiderable piece from the medulla oblongata of St. Face.
Act One began: Aurora pricked her finger, Carabosse cackled, the Lilac Fairy entered, commanded a forest to grow, and just as she brought Florimund to the palace to kiss the princess, Lady Therefore sighed as a coda to it all, “I should have stayed home and played pushpin!” Simultaneously, an enchanted Which was curving his hand to impose pictorial composition on the final tableau that he might commemoratively carry it home. The lights came up.
“King Florestan’s off, isn’t he?” remarked Which, sitting up and wiping his fingers on a pansy-embroidered handkerchief. People, all around, stretched. “He will make those goo-goo eyes, dreadfully unbecoming, don’t you think, seeing he has the thighs of a yak? No, not up to the magnet, I’m afraid. Not up to the magnet at all.” But Which, passionate balletomane, burned for the dance, and, whatever the shortcomings, he could give intricate statistical descriptions—as he often did for his mother as they rode home—of every cabriole, fovetté, and soubresaut. In his delirious mind, even hours later, the milk-white coryphée spun and bobbed in stiffened net and graded frills as did the perfectly formed male solistes, in black velvet gilet or Greek chiton, who seemed to ride the wind.
“Trulls all,” averred Lady Therefore, thinking of the wasted evening surely better spent in a good game of Bezique, in which, by the way, she always showed a wildly fated ability to win points even on the difficult Royal Marriage, never once forfeiting.
“Did you see Prince Florimund during that grand jeté?”
She yawned. “Vis-à-vis?”
“His satin de Lyon tights?”
“Charming, to be sure.”
“Them’s nutmegs,” Which giggled into her shoulder.
“Actually, the Prince of the West looked he had a perfectly frightful case of nephritis,” she said.
“The Prince of the Fat Fibula.” It was a joke he couldn’t resist.
“He looked as if he used nasal spray to comb his hair.”
“That was hair?” Which asked, smirking into his hand.
“Furze, rather.” She smiled a wave to someone somewhere. “As rigid as a barmaid’s.”
“Capital!” Which clapped.
“Ninette de Valois, pray for us,” said his mother with a paulo maiora canamus expression crossing her face as she folded her arms. She needed a drink, she said. “Come, we’re a cup too low”—and she and her son, upon whom she leaned, stepped nodding to no one out of their seats and moved processionally, with their co-religionists, up the main aisle, the mother all the while giving out with dry bitter cacks bearing on the wasted evening. Once in the foyer, Which stood in with a huge group of men at the bar, each one noisily advertising an overpowering thirst, and ordered when his turn came two iced vermouths; then, holding them high, he lurched back to where his mother was sitting, exhausted, in the midst of some haughty damson-eyed women and a crowd of stiff-backed men looking all remarkably like John Ruskin.
In the foyer, the chandeliers, all brightly lit, gave off the sheen of sunned snow to the winking composition of gems and jewels below, refracted in tiny burns from stickpin, necklace, diadem. Proud ladies in pelerine capes and empennaged hats and gentlemen in polished dickeys danced, and would forever, a minuet of good fellowship, poise, and a predestined alliance, passed on from generation to generation. Gay laughter echoed throughout the foyer like the high tinkle of ice-cream chimes as ceremonious introductions and reunions took place with the selected proems and soft enunciations impeccable taste alone can dictate—a pretty spindrift from the hard, mercantile conversations that broke only in private and unwitnessed crashes on the metaphorical shores of home, office, or within the chambers of Parliament. I
f one beheld the handsome crowd, ringed around in well-fed faces, expensive cloth, and rutilant mandibles from which emanated large draughts of self-assurance and the smell of good money, one also beheld a blessed crowd, aureate in the halo looped over only the singled-out and sanctified, those alone guaranteed, with quiet confidence and divine right, that boon so many seek, so few would know—the promenade from Life into Eternal Reward through the Doors of Paradise wrought with golden hinges by the Triune God, alone, happy, and breathless as He waited politely to meet and live forever with His peers, masters all of that heterogeneous collection of territories from Africa to Asia, Malta to the Zambesi, from the island of Anguilla to the reaches of Hong Kong. The Deity was given precedence; it was only fair—though it was understood equally, of course, as a primus inter pares situation that permitted the lower case D to be used and accepted as good form, for by employing the capital initial one feared, realistically, just the slightest dash of flunkeyism in the usage. Society worked that way. It did not work any other way. This was not a gathering of hatchet-faced couples or yodeling, country-bred herberts in cloth coats and hard brown shoes down from Scrabster, out for a night on the tiles. Neither was it a Narrenschiff of walleyed conventioneers slapping each other on the back and squeaking through horns. Nor, yet, was this a mere group filled with finicky whims, teasing each other with ineffectual velleities and social chit-chat. It was, in fact, an event, only another of those moments in the march of time that sent into the wide-eyed and onlooking world of nondescripts and churls the hunting cry of the ancien régime: “Floreat England!”
Suddenly, Lady Therefore burst out of her seat, much in the same way a frog will explode like a pistol when thrown into a fire; she grabbed for a railing and sputtered out, as if from infective breath, a poison blast of air that seemed to dampen and wilt the helix of shiny ivies bucketed in gold on the spiralling staircase before her.
“It’s that whipjack black,” she spat.
“Cyril?”
“I see no bone,” snapped Lady Therefore, facing the wall, “but that is Jo-Jo, the Dogfaced Boy, isn’t it? How sick-making!”
“Bone, you say?”
His mother pointed with little jabs in the direction of her clenched nostril as an explanation. She added, “Don’t notice him.” It was more command than advice. The victim always sees the difference.
“I won’t see him,” Which replied weakly, without conviction, in a flash of not-very-soundly-managed repartee as he noticed his choirmaster bobbing through elbows and arms, directionless, like a seal. He offered to get his mother a glass of hot black currant, an aid upon which he often relied in order to confect disparate matters simply. It was very like him, especially at such moments when he inevitably thought of St. Unencumber, patron saint of women in delicate predicaments.
“Is he habitué here, may I ask?”
“Well, that’s rather the capstone of the whole thing, you see. You realize why he is here, of course.” Which surveyed the long hall imperiously, drew some air through his nose, bent down, and stared deep into his mother’s eyelash fixative. “The little coloured nosegay you saw up there in the burnt-umber tutu dancing the Fairy of Temperament is his Intended, coordinately seen, recognized, and proposed to within a fortnight, mind you.” He paused. “Or so I’ve been told.”
“Do you say so?”
“Anita,” Which asserted in a voice full of mimicry, “which may rhyme with muy bonita, but I’d be the first to disagree, given I’ve had the redoubtable pleasure of seeing her without stage paint, which more or less puts her into the pure nigger bracket, you see. Grim?” he asked, “Grim,” he answered. And he sought here to darken an unbidden picture now forming in his mind, the unmistakable image of St. Petronilla, patron saint of charwomen, who is always portrayed running about indefatigably with an arched broom.
“Nevertheless, she’s a ballerina. Their private lives are worse than was Lot’s wife’s. They’re all on the Soviet payroll. And they have the personalities of Medea, true. But they are not salesgirls, say what you will.”
“I prefer Markova.”
“Born Marx.”
The patronymic was abhorrent on several levels.
Which looked up, surprised. “Is nothing sacred?”
“Yom Kippur, presumably,” said Lady Therefore.
“For her?”
“Certainly not for me.”
“For Markova.”
“Born Marx,” repeated Lady Therefore dryly. It was not redundant. It was clarifying, something to be kept in mind at all times, and invoked when necessary. The same was true of the Lord’s Prayer.
“Anyway,” said Which, “it appears the poor oaf knew her in the home country, wants to return with her. He’s constantly at her beck and call, so I’ve heard. The calls are endless; she must have two strings to each bow. The becks are worse, and apparently she’s been becking him right from those very first days in the thornbushes of the Tonga, during the transcontinental jump, and then all the way to London cum England without stop as if he were King Shrovetide, Monarch of Sneak Island. In any case, with me it’s all too simple: no Cyril, no choirleader; no choirleader, no choir; no choir—well, you see how it goes. For her he leaves me flat.”
“Why her?”
“Her,” Which snapped. “Just her.” He felt no compulsion to explain what he took no pleasure in recalling.
“A mopsy. A demirep.”
“Hear, hear.” Which yawned.
“Laced mutton.”
“A temptress.”
“A Jezebel to the eyeline,” she remarked, looking at her gloves critically, “excuse that, but I’ll give you she does pray with her knees up. It was the smile. Chaucerian. It evoked barbarities.” Then Lady Therefore peered inconspicuously in the direction of Cyril, who was washing his hands in the water fountain. She sipped her vermouth. She was out of pocket, Which could tell; it was the stricken look that bespoke bad hands in their late-evening games of Pontoon. “And as for him, well, with a face like that, my dear boy, he’d as soon try to milk a pigeon.”
“Well, there you are,” her son replied vacantly.
“And, of course, all this serves only to show your average baboon would run up and fondle anything with a temperature of 98.6, animal, vegetable, mineral, or pound-note, the nincompoop. That’s exactly what’s happening on the other side, in the colonies. I say, now where are you with your half-dozen and three arguments to prove me their brainpan is any larger than a follicle on Hop-O’-My-Thumb’s rubber leg.” She sipped again, smuckered. “A darkman’s budge who’d give his eyeteeth and the Channel Islands thrown in for even so much as a good-day-and-how-are-you from an English girl, bet on it, bet on it, dear.”
Lady Therefore tried to make harmlessly unpremeditated and desultory what were, in fact, immaculately deliberate remarks, borne of those mis en place reflections that commonly point out what garden we should cultivate, that east is east, and just how birds of a feather should flock.
“Are you the woman to enjoy an irony?” Which suddenly asked his mother as if preoccupied with an interior joke. Lady Therefore’s mouth sprouted into a valentine.
“The very.” She moved closer.
“Well,” Which began, with a ripple of a simper playing on the corner of his mouth. “On Queen’s Accession last I had Cyril over for my Escargots Bourguignonne—candles, music, the lot.”
“Don’t say it. He filched the spoons.”
“It was quite the evening,” continued Which, shaking off the supposition. “Let’s see, we started off with an amuse-bouche of Beluga caviar. Next, we had a ripping cream soup of imported German pfifferlinge mushrooms (here, he raised his thumb) and, for a touch of the bubbly, a nice wet Moët et Chandon; then, fresh strawberries marinated in kirschwasser and covered with an absolutely scrumpy orange sauce (here, he joined in a circle index finger and thumb) and, and, and”—Which began to bounce up and down excitedly trying to remember but almost not wanting to do so, it was all so devilish—“oh yes, fre
sh chicory coffee and, wheeee!, three or four snifters of Hennessy Extra, which, let me tell you, nigger or no, he had little or no compunction in knocking back. A-n-y-w-a-y, the thing is, I had done my bread that afternoon (here, he kissed the tips of three joined fingers), and, this is the giggle, I pointed this out to him, ‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘this is called the kissing crust’—the part where the loaves had touched in the oven, you see; well, may I be frank in telling you that Miss Prunella over there in the ten-guinea suit leans across the empty shells and tongs, listen Mother, and directly says to me, ‘I eat so good, I should kiss you.’ ” Which popped his eyes and plugged his cheek with his tongue. “Kiss. Me!”
“Good,” she took a massive breath, “heavens!” Then Lady Therefore, for whom familiarity had always been a kind of impudence, clamped her jaws together tight as a cowry; she sucked her cheeks in and candidly nodded as a sign that she had clearly divined the very act, so universal it was, years ago—with the extended meaning, of course, that it was a great if existential pity that people like her son had to undergo those experiences which were eminently avoidable, because ever foreseen, to the specially endowed prophetic.
“Now that’s bloody-minded.” She grabbed for a cigarette out of her vair cigarette case and fumbled it into her mouth. Which lighted it, and she coughed out a rattle of tobacco fumes, adding, “What infernal cheek!”—the last vowel combination making for a not insignificant blast of exhaust which sent forth in smoke a parade of crazy blue animals.
“Rather a pity, I suppose.”
“That he’s onto you?”
“Well, no actually, rather that he and the little titmouse who was golfing around up there in that perfectly clumsy battement dégagé—or that embarrassing croisée derrière, when you kicked the seat—will soon come home by weeping cross, shouldn’t you think? What I mean is, when she’ll bubble, he’ll squeak. Wouldn’t that be more bang-on?”
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