Three Wogs

by Alexander Theroux

  “Then you are, my dear boy, the victim of hypothesis.”

  He felt an inward groan come from within him, a volley of sighs, faint but clear, light but poignantly sad, like the flutter of laughter echoing from the past. “They were rather utterly too too, he answered in an eggshell voice as he remained unmoving, slumped against his mother. And so they sat together in the hollow of the pew, surrounded by the intimidations of eerie darkness, a jumbled Pietà.

  Although it was her constant maxim, Which reflected, that the Church should never be polluted with irreverent combinations, he was extremely surprised that his mother had not only patiently tolerated this wedding but had not whistled in Scotland Yard to insist they impound the choir, whose rubbernecking, even obscene, performance sounded like a Mau-Mau circumcision ceremony or some kind of hallucinogenic gang-bang performed on coconut matting in some out of the way Tibbu village. With relish, he had once assumed, would his mother have happily meted out to them that condign but infinitely more deserved punishment through which St. Primus, patron saint of the congenially mute, so singularly met his end, i.e., by having a few dollops of moulten lead poured into his mouth—a curious non ex ossibus relic which was then extracted and eventually placed on a wand as a commemorative ball-cum-sacramental in the garden of a devoted Franciscan tertiary somewhere in Goose Rocks, Maine.

  Suddenly, an idea fell into his head like an errant pinball sped precipitately on its way, through targets and obstacles, down the slanted surface of his mind.

  “You know,” Which began, his hands clasped, the knuckles standing out sharply, “I have a nagging suspicion some chap is playing the deuce with me?”

  Lady Therefore sat up. “What could you be talking about?”

  “You saw the groom?”

  “In his best bib and tucker—and no less the kind of Lascar, to my mind, who on any given dark night, pick one, would bolt out from a tree and pinch you blue as a blushing dog, or worse, just to write home about it. The boy has a screw loose.”

  “And, of course, you saw the bride.”

  “The veriest sillypop,” answered Lady Therefore, whose face filled with ruminant, sly fun. Then, she frowned. “A rude shock, yes. A complete surprise, no. I’ve met the type, my dear boy. May I suggest her sisters became aunts rather young?”

  “Oh dash!” Which snivelled petulantly, assuming his mother had for some reason brought to mind the memory of Georgie Quaiff (q.v.). “I meant her gown. Had you a look at that? Schiffli embroidered organza, if you will, with val lace insets, and a venise-edged mantilla. Au courant? Let me say so. I’m certain it was Courrèges.” The detailed description indicated preoccupation, perhaps a willingness to experiment.

  “What did you expect, dear boy, to see the pert baggage march up to the altar in her stocking feet, wearing mosquito-netting and dishcloth?”

  “I expected,” he grizzled, “no such thing, Mother, and, though a bracingly unorthodox thought, it’s rather off the point. I’m talking about money—and lots of it. Just where did it all come from?” The pinball gained momentum, wheeled, clanked helter-skelter.

  “To my mind, that sort pans out well enough from the money standpoint.” She reviewed her fingernails.

  “Welfare, you think?”

  “General monkeyana,” Lady Therefore yawned, patting her mouth with the rapid flutter of her glove. “You know, dustmen, bus drivers, bumbailiffs. They’re not really the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but there’s a living wage there for anyone, be he who he may, though the taste for such kind of work is special and, I gather, acquired.”

  “Rot, Mother,” he replied with an unprelatical boyish whine. “Somebody has his foot in the dish, I’m certain of it.”

  “You are in a pickle,” she said and tweaked him on the knee to try to dispel the sullen sense of injury in his heart. “I suppose we all are, what with all the whim-wham in the world today. Violence, guns, Baptists, devaluation, mustard gas, an American on every corner, and everybody having to take off his clothes to have a good time. I blame the horrid brat of historicity.”

  “Cold comfort that,” he sulked.

  “You used to be so happy.”

  “DeQuincey used to be a dopefiend.”

  “Not to hate, my dear boy, there’s just so much to resent in you. You are so thoroughly tiresome when you’re like this,” she snapped. The grumpy exchanges ebbed, a long effortful brooding flowed. Quibbles seemed useless. He no longer, it seemed, could find himself in arguments for some time now coating him over in layers, and he lost his tooth like some sloppily, heavily leaded canvas. Then she looked at him, not smiling, but pressing her small chin slightly into her neck. She took his hand, while snapping the last buttons on the pair of white dog-skin gloves she wore. “Come dear, don’t mind me. The driver is waiting on us out front.”

  “The driver?”

  “An old woman needs her leeways. I had hoped for a game of bumble-puppy with you tonight. Or a nice evening of two-handed euchre. Now, will I be disappointed again? You know what you mean to me, so come along dear, please.” Which looked up wistfully into her pinched, wintry face that now seemed animated with a tiny sparkle and detected there, he thought, a trace of intractable sureness, a triumphant glow, as Lady Therefore, preoccupied with the power and advantage officially established at Cana, led him through the dark church door. She was in the tradition of those brave, long-suffering mothers—tiny, gimp, stiff as buckram—stumping across the eternal pages of Scripture in their sweet old exponential shoes: Jochebed; the Mother of Ichabod; Rizpah; Hannah; the Widow of Sarepta; the Great Lady of Shunem, who gat heat; and, not least surely, the innominate but for that no less estimable Syrophoenician Woman, she of the vexations.

  Which stopped short on the steps of the church; he perceived himself a fool, a butt of fate, a sappy and ineffective degradand riddled with foreign matter: questions, guesses, speculations. He felt like a bottle of cheap wine filled with bits of cork. Everything had happened so fast.

  “Did you know, by the way, that the Bishop cut me in this whole affair?” The pinball rattled into a post, jolted free on a swirl. “I rather thought he was one to keep a straight bat.”

  “What are you on about?” asked Lady Therefore, hobbling along, unperturbed, tapping her cane. “The Bishop?”

  “Correct. He wrote to me and told me, you see, told me, to get on with it.”

  “It?”

  “Do the wedding,” he waved his hand maniacally, “hire that humpty choir, the lot!”

  “Sad fudge, I’m afraid,” said Lady Therefore.

  “Him with his rent-roll, new tennis courts, and pomposity, the big ninny! To pull the rug out from under me, such as he did, is unforgivable, quite.” Which squinted away. “Un. For. Givable.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Good God, had I the foggiest, would I bring the matter up?” His imagination stampeded. No law or agency could be identified. Nothing, it seemed, could escape the prowling and eruptive forces of pursuit and arrest in a world daily lost to new guarantees and privileges. And now Cyril, Caton Infidèle. He had a vision of the world as the Ultimate Panopticon, the perfect prison so designed by a rhyparographic God that He could, just for His Own amusement, send His minions to distress and thrash away from men even the least of their paraplegic opinions, their most harmless and unspoken dreams. Then spontaneously rose before Which a horrible reality: God Himself as an inflexible, fault-finding precisian, as warty as Cromwell—the subtle Dr. Irrefragabilis, with psalm book, inkhorn, and pale candle, blinking over His brittle parliamentarian docket to oversee at a singularly aseptic distance the poor human creatures, with whom He sports, humiliatingly dunked into ponds in cucking stools, pilloried by their ringers, and locked into thumbscrews as if each was of no more worth than the smallest flitch of bacon. Ours was merely the life between splashes: doused, gasping away, pneumonic. Time finishes the job God started, Which thought, but why had Man been dragged in to watch? The dehumanization was bloodcurdling.
We were merely formulas, each an index of peeves, hopes, joys, and grudges, and our formulas were on file in a secret cabinet somewhere in the last recesses of the Eternal Mind.

  The late afternoon darkened. A dirty fog settled in and seemed to stain everything in anthracite: anthracite trees, anthracite buildings, anthracite people. A large silver-and-glass limousine, plush and sleek and shiny, was rolled up to the kerb and alone seemed sealed to the dullness spreading through the streets. Lady Therefore took the wet steps in paces, like a holy fowl. She turned and gave Which her arm as they trod down the steps, over the small flakes of wet, coloured confetti, down to the waiting car.

  “As I said, dear, I am so looking forward,” she announced through the window as he eased the door shut, “to having you steady again and back with me just as it always was, fine as fippence.”

  “Well,” Which answered half-heartedly, “I shan’t stay all night, Mother. It’s been a day. I’m rather thumped in, spoony, you know.” He entered the car and sat in its expensive gloom.

  “There’s a good boy. But I don’t refer to only tonight, Which. I’m just pleased you’ll be with me always, you see. Remember your antecedents,” she said, her eyes now growing mistily autoreminiscent, “so be a gentleman, be a dear. You know what they say.”

  Which rolled his head lugubriously toward her. An amused sic probo smile, Which noticed, seemed to flicker across her little mouth. “No,” he asked, “what?”

  “Not important.”

  “What?” he insisted.

  “I was going to say—”

  “Yes?”

  “Pay up,” she said, “and look pretty.”

  It was like a flute note blown across a pond.

  The pinball plunged through its fast action, rolled smoothly over the grooves, rung a glass bell, and, lighting up a bright series of bulbs on a mirror, it tilted into a final hole with a loud click.

  Paralyzed, Which Therefore felt a terror, a vast humiliation, grip his hair, and, wide-eyed in utter disbelief, he turned slowly toward his mother. But she was talking.

  O where, she asked in an almost hypnotic dream-reverie, her eyes moist and shining through a mask flushed with old distant thoughts, O where had flown that quaint and merciful fidelity that bound Mother and Child together in a lifetime of discovery, that cozy shipshape world of Used-to-Be, when the waterfalls of Cremorne splashed along in runnels, and rivulets bubbled through trimmed gardens and pavilions of oaks on those long, never-ending autumnal days when the blackthorn showered down its petals and the lowing herd wound slowly o’er the lea? When last seen those moments of peaceful vagabondage when handsome rakes, all of English nativity, sat high and lovely in the saddle and took a turn, on a cob or palfrey, through lush country fens or dashed in hunting pinks across the rolling hills in point-to-point gallops to the cries of “Tally Ho”? Had they gone forever, those gay Lotharios—with rue their hearts were laden—who once held lovely ladies balancing in the pas de poursuite of the Redowa Waltz and then, in chests of medals and strong black boots, sat lovestruck and poetic in the filigree gazebos, drenched in moonlight and musky blooms and made one sob with the long, dark looks that sparked a cheek to redden and caused a downcast eye? How bring back those mild, halcyon Sundays, filled with promenades and the darkling thrush, when craggy, high-collared Men of Principle gathered together in Palladian mansions, behind thick curtains, before rich tapestries, and sipped sherry in earnest, while fresh, ivory-cheeked girls in snowy pinafores played battledore among the white roses of a Jacobean garden? Why nevermore the People of Quality who tripped through cold mornings to Kensington Palace or rode to visit the Queen in high-swung barouches with immense armorial bearings on the panels? Why no longer in evidence those strawberry girls from the little villages of Nether Lipp and Tooting Horn who looked to a one like the Blessed Damozel and ran barefooted through the sweet dewy grass to the music of lovesick pigeons, or avidly cheered, with lilting voices, the balloon races at Vauxhall on those brown-sunned, unforgettable summers when the skies were sailboat blue? Shall all this have been lost forever: the stately rooms at Osterley, Marble Hill, and Knole; the weekends down to Cowes, when bold-hearted men, smelling of leather and ancient sack, strode out from the feudal donjons of their fathers, across the avenues and coppices of their estates, shooting grouse and stalking golden deer; the copses and thickets of Glastonbury, rich in holy thorn, where Christ had spent so many happy days in His teenage years with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathaea? And what of Arthur and Avalon, the tinkle of the muffin bell, the merrie pieman, and the whistling knife-grinder in his wide, fat apron who trod the cobbled streets? Who remembered the old English games and festivals of bun-throwing, apple-howling, soaling, the hare-pie scramble, pancake tossing, wassailing the apple trees, mumming, burning the ashen faggot, and clipping the church? And what had happened to the kind, paternal lamplighter, smiling down a benison and flaming up the lampwick to only once again reassure the quiet village, and forevermore, that “All Will Be Well, All Manner of Things”? The Lion and the Unicorn would always boldly guard the door that led to that paradise, the land of sweetness, light, and transforming prevenient grace, and yet, asked Lady Therefore, could she at last unto that sacred portal, into that sacred land, one day bring her son to spend their final days together, only themselves, alone?

  Which, however, was not listening. He was staring flatly through the closed car window into the remorseless darkness, helpless, lost, alone to himself, shrunk into the cushion in the back seat of the car—only the small dot of his head visible—like the last hemophiliac son, a titled heir in his nonage, to the long privileged dynasty of good blood, begun with William the Conqueror, that, over the years and down the stretch of centuries, had thinned, weakened, sterilized. He opened his mouth to speak, but he could not move a muscle. His tongue was like soft white rubber. Neither was the car, the early night air, nor any momentum of future resolve within him moving. All was quite, in fact, at a standstill. It was nightfall. And, remorselessly, the characteristic of nightfall, only once again, was its blackness.

  London 1970