“Good God!” bawled Sir Balfour, flinging The Telegraph onto the table. “It’s like the arrival of the sodding Mahdi Army!”
“Can I help, ma’am?” I offered, in the most deferential tone I could muster. “You appear to be slightly tangled.” I slid from my chair and dropped to one knee. She was nearly as tall as I and quite striking, though possibly a little too veteran for me to entertain any serious carnal thoughts. Mind, you give me another bottle or two…
“Please do be careful, this is haute couture!” she warned, but stood still as I unpicked the animal’s sharp features from the material. As I returned the giraffe to its proper spot, Lady Edith planted herself at the far end of the table to Sir Balfour. “So, where do you school, Felix?” she enquired, in the tone of one with limited expectations.
“Felix is taking his A Levels at Fletching Ordnance, mother,” answered Portia. “It’s a very good public school near Hampstead Heath.”
“Bunch of buggering bastards, I expect,” muttered Sir Balfour. “Wine Kumal!”
I was pleased the news of my expulsion had not yet travelled beyond Felching Orchard. It would only have complicated matters.
“And your parents?” There was a wary note in her voice.
“I’m not entirely sure where my father was schooled, Lady Edith. He was from Portugal.”
“Oh dear.”
“Related to the Symmingtons was he?” enquired Sir Balfour.
I suspected this might be the right answer, whoever the hell they were. “Yes, indeed, sir. A minor branch of the Symmingtons.”
“Oh. Well. That’s probably all right then,” he muttered doubtfully. “Kumal! Some red please! My glass has been empty for the past bloody month!”
The butler brought a bottle from the sideboard and filled his glass. He walked to the other end of the table and filled Lady Edith’s before seeing to mine.
Sir Balfour took a long sip and grunted in approval. “Very good. What is it Kumal?” He took another mouthful, as did I.
“Argentinian, sir.”
Sir Balfour choked and coughed loudly. “For the love of God!” he shouted, when he had recovered. “They’re the fucking enemy!”
“Bal, really! Try to behave! We’re not fighting them anymore,” Lady Edith scolded. “The nice man from Majestic Wine recommended it. And anyway, I like Malbec. There was an article about it in The Times last week. Apparently they employ young polo riders as cellar hands in the off season.”
“I would love to see that, it sounds fascinating,” I said, giving my most charming smile.
Lady Edith appeared to soften a little. Looking more closely I realised her livid lip colour, not to mention that of her teeth, probably had more to do with a soaking in Argentinian Malbec than the careful application of Dior.
“Bloody communists,” muttered Sir Balfour. “Kumal, get me some claret, will you?”
“Mother. Father,” began Portia. “Felix and I have some news.”
My stomach tightened and I suddenly felt rather cold and sweaty. I wasn’t sure this was the optimal moment.
“What’s that dear?” enquired Lady Edith.
“Felix wishes to ask father for my hand in marriage.”
In for a penny, in for a pound. Old Balfour was clearly a wealthy chap, and there were worse places to live than a country estate an hour from London. Maybe I’d be gifted a little cottage in the grounds. “I would be honoured, sir.”
There was a stunned silence while Sir Balfour stared at me. “What the hell do you want to do that for?”
Lady Edith stretched a hand towards Portia. “Portia dear, I know he’s good looking, but you can do better. I had Jeremy Spott-Hythe in mind, actually.”
Yes, why don’t you marry Jeremy, I thought. That’s a much better idea. He can have the bloody sprog too. I won’t even charge him for the privilege.
“Jeremy is eight years old, mother.”
“But his father owns that huge vineyard down the road, dear.” She looked at me with pity. “What land do you own Felix?”
“Not a lot.”
“What the hell’s going on, boy? You haven’t made her pregnant have you?” growled Sir Balfour.
“Ah. Well…”
“Yes he has, father. I’m having a baby in July.”
“Oh heaven help us!” wailed Lady Edith.
Sir Balfour rose slowly from his seat, his face turning puce with rage. “What! By God, boy, I’ll have you gelded! Kumal! Get my shotgun!”
“Very good, sir.”
I had a terrible sense that things were slipping out of control. “I do apologise, Sir Balfour, I didn’t mean anything by it. Kumal, I’m sure there’s no need for firearms. Can’t we just have a civilised discussion?”
Kumal ignored me and left the room. Oh Jesus, I’d have to do a runner. But I was miles from the station and I had no car. I wouldn’t get half a mile before the mad old bastard rode me down with the hounds.
“How could you be so foolish, Portia? How could you!” chided Lady Edith. She drained her glass in one gulp and rose, advancing on me. Christ, I was about to be caught in a pincer movement. Time to get out of here before Kumal returned with the gun. I jumped up from my chair and turned to the door but Lady Edith lunged and grabbed my left arm with both hands. She was surprisingly strong.
“Tell me you forced yourself on her! Tell me she had no choice in the matter!”
“Er… would that be better?”
Lady Edith tightened her grip and looked beseechingly at me. “Yes it would. It really would. Please tell me it was rape! It must have been!”
“Oh don’t be ridiculous mother, it was all perfectly consensual,” sighed Portia.
“Oh God no! The shame!” wailed Lady Edith, releasing me and clutching her head.
As Kumal returned to the room with the shotgun I realised it was time to flee this madhouse immediately. I’d gone off marriage and children completely. The butler handed the gun to Sir Balfour who pointed it across the table at me. I took cover behind Portia’s chair.
“Get out from behind my daughter you miserable coward!” bellowed Sir Balfour.
“Daddy! Daddy! Stop being silly and put that down!” Portia looked over her shoulder. “Felix! Get up and talk to father like a man!”
“He’s got a bloody gun! You talk to him!”
Portia sighed impatiently, rose and approached her father, beckoning for the gun. Unfortunately, that meant I’d lost my human shield. I raced along the table to Lady Edith’s chair while Sir Balfour followed me with the shotgun, taking aim down the barrel.
“No Bal! Not the Spode!” Lady Edith flung herself across the table to protect the china jugs and I crouched, using her body as cover.
“Get out of the bloody way Edie!”
“They’re 1815 Bal! They’re our daughter’s inheritance!”
God bless old Spode, I thought. But Sir Balfour was advancing round the table, despite his daughter attempting to wrestle the gun out of his hands. I crawled under the table and scurried on hands and knees to the far side, only to come face to face with the business end of the shotgun and Balfour’s grimly triumphant face. He’d shaken off Portia and I’d run out of hiding places. “Now you’ll get what’s coming to you!” he wheezed.
I raised my hands and blubbed like a baby. “Please, Sir Balfour. I didn’t mean any harm! I’m an orphan. My father was a soldier who lost his life in Northern Ireland and my mother died soon afterwards of heartbreak.”
“Thought you said he was Portuguese?” Sir Balfour prodded the barrels of the shotgun against my forehead.
“Anglo-Portuguese!” I gibbered. “I was raised by monks and they taught me right from wrong. I’ve never so much as held hands with a girl before, but when I met your daughter I fell deeply in love. I saw my own mother in her face you see, I couldn’t help myself.”
“Don’t talk to me about love, you horrible little scrotum! You’re an alley rat!”
I was in a flat panic. The tears were coming thic
k and fast. “I’m not! I was due to take holy orders, I swear on the Gospels sir! I promise to do the right thing, we are due to marry and I will cherish your daughter forever. I’ll make you proud, sir. Please don’t shoot me, I can’t bear the thought that my family name will end in violence, just like that of my dear father. He would have been so proud to see his grandchild follow him into the Services. I only wish he were here now…”
For a second I thought I’d overdone it, but Sir Balfour slowly lowered the weapon, still frowning and wheezing. “Killed by the Mick, was he? Savages!”
Lady Edith grasped the gun and took it from her husband. “Oh you poor thing,” she cried. “We had no idea your background was so tragic.”
I crawled out from under the table, sniffing. “All I ever wanted was stability and a loving home.” I dabbed at my entirely genuine tears of relief. Lady Edith embraced me and I hugged her back.
“Not sure I liked the thing about him wanting to shag his mother,” muttered Sir Balfour, his face lightening to a marginally healthier shade of red. “Still, I suppose that’s what you get when you hang around with monks.”
There then followed a rather awkward, silent meal of revoltingly tough meat, accompanied by potatoes riddled with black spots. I compensated by drinking as much wine as possible.
Portia observed me dispassionately. After the meal she informed me, out of earshot of her parents, that she’d had second thoughts about the marriage. Furthermore, she had decided to bring up the child along feminist principles, without the disruptive effect of rogue males, and that it might be best if we didn’t see each other quite so often.
I wondered briefly if it had anything to do with my hiding behind womenfolk when faced with a shotgun, or my whimpering cock-and-bull story to her father. I embraced her and I’m not embarrassed to say I wept again, genuine tears of relief cascading down my cheeks.
By mid-afternoon, with the beef lying like the sole of an old boot in my belly, I was delighted to take my leave of Cackering Hall and its residents. I kissed the hand of Lady Edith, who by this time was comatose in her chair, and shook that of Sir Balfour.
“I accept you’re not a scoundrel but you’re a flawed man, not my cup of tea at all. I shall be speaking to your headmaster and I shall leave it in his hands as to how you are punished. I will, however, recommend a sound thrashing.”
You’re a bit late for that one, you self-righteous wazzock, I thought. “I quite understand sir. I shall accept my punishment with honour.”
***
On my final day at Felching Orchard that Monday I was duly hauled in front of the holy trinity: The Reverend Parr, looking like an Old Testament prophet with a twisted bollock; good old Mr du Plessis, pretending to look grave; and the red-faced chief duffer himself, old Dr Pie ’n Crust, looking like a Victorian undertaker whose client had just requested a penis-shaped gravestone.
It was fair to say the Reverend Parr regarded the news of my fertility as the crowning turd on a multi-tiered cake of ordure. He broadcast a fiery sermon, around six inches from my face, on sexual propriety and the perils of moral turpitude, while I struggled to avoid gagging on his pea-soup halitosis.
I’ve no idea what qualified him to deliver the lecture. I doubt he’d shoved his sticky wick in anything other than the hole in the chapel door since 1962. At one point he demanded to know whether I was regularly troubled by temptation, to which I was able to reply, quite truthfully, that it rarely troubled me at all.
And so, with the Reverend Parr’s hellfire words still ringing in my ears, not to mention the stench of his rotting gums lingering in my nose, I departed Felching Orchard, heading for the cold outside world with all my worldly possessions stuffed into an army surplus kit bag.
1.3
The Great British High Street
A dejected walk down Crouch End High Street later that afternoon brought my predicament into even sharper focus. I wasn’t just expelled from school and broke, I was also homeless. I could probably stay at Tariq’s for a while, but sooner or later I’d have to find a place to live.
I made a plan. I would take a cheap coach to the South of France where I would live by my wits, drinking hearty red wine in sun-dappled squares by day and servicing the needs of sexually frustrated duchesses by night. I’d become the muse and companion of a lonely, attractive and fabulously wealthy widow, who would buy me a vineyard of my own.
It was a good plan, with very little downside. Unfortunately, I had only sixty quid in my Post Office account which would barely get me to Calais, never mind Cannes.
So for now I would crash at Tariq’s mansion on The Bishops Avenue and get a job. Tariq’s place had an indoor swimming pool with karaoke, and the house was so vast that his parents would be unlikely to know I was even there. They spent half their time in Dubai anyway. The South of France would have to wait.
I found the Crouch End branch of Charlie’s Cellar, an off-licence chain with branches across London and the Home Counties. This was a large branch, with a wide glass facade dominating a busy junction. Chalk boards were propped against the wall advertising various deals – two bottles for five pounds, five for a tenner. The window was festooned with posters boasting that the chain had been named Wine Emporium Of The Year.
I walked in and nodded to the gangly youth leaning over the counter. He wore a baggy red and black striped rugby shirt.
He nodded back. “Alright mate. Can I help you with anything?”
“I wondered if you had any jobs going.”
“Boss?” he shouted back into the little office behind the counter.
An obese, crew-cut man, painfully squeezed into a similar rugby shirt – which appeared to be the uniform of Charlie’s Cellar – waddled out of the office, a copy of the Racing Post in his hand. “No pal, we haven’t any vacancies, sorry.” He had a brisk Scouse accent. He turned and disappeared back into the office.
“Please, sir. I’m a passionate wine enthusiast and I’ll work like a Trojan,” I called through the open door.
The fat boss reappeared at the door, the spare tyre around his waist brushing both sides of the frame. “Like a Trojan, eh?” He tittered in a high voice, waves of fat rippling. “What are you, a classical scholar?” Something suddenly dawned on him and he stopped laughing. “Hang on. Are you from that posh school down the road? You’re Mr du Plessis’s boy aren’t you? He phoned and said you might be coming down.”
“Er… yes, that’s me.”
“All right. You’re hired. I like Mr du Plessis. He’s one of our best customers.”
“But boss, we don’t have any spare shifts,” whined the gangly youth, tugging at his wispy goatee.
“Yes we do pal. Yours. Piss off, you’re fired.”
“Wha…?” gasped the youth.
“You heard me, you’re fired. You’re lazy, you’re fuckin thieving and you’re too fuckin working class for our customers anyway. I need a better-spoken arsehole round here. Get lost.”
“Fucking hell!” spat the youth, shooting me a look of hatred as he marched to the door.
“Hey! And leave the fuckin shirt as well, that’s company property that is!”
“Fuck you all!” he yelled, pulling his baggy top off to reveal a yellowing vest over a pale torso, tiny tufts of dark armpit hair contrasting with his sallow, hairless chest. He threw the shirt at his ex-boss and turned to the door.
“Hey! Have some fuckin respect you cheeky fuckin cunt!” The manager lifted a large bag of peanuts from the counter and hurled it at the youth’s head. It just missed, splitting against the metal door frame as the boy ducked and ran from the shop.
“Right. You can wear that.” He threw the ex-employee’s shirt at me. “Probably fit you better, anyway. First fuckin job, clear that shit up.” He waggled a sausage-like finger at the spray of peanuts covering the floor. “I’ve got paperwork to do.”
He rolled back into his tiny office and sat on a distressed chair, sponge stuffing bursting from its seat and back. He picked up the R
acing Post and frowned in concentration.
“Yes sir. Thank you for the opportunity.”
And so began my first tentative steps in the wine trade. The pay was poor and the hours were long, but with Tariq putting me up in an unused bedroom in the east wing of the Hussein mansion in exchange for a generous discount on booze, my expenses were manageable.
The bulbous boss’s name was Terry. He was from a rough estate in Liverpool and had worked as a nightclub bouncer before settling in London after an unexplained falling out with some relatives. When I asked if he ever visited his family he muttered something about a “bunch of fuckin cunts,” which I took to mean the conversation was over.
There were three other members of staff, most of whom worked alongside me in the evenings when the shop became busy and required a double shift. Raj was the delivery driver while Maria was a petite art student from the local college, whom I was soon tupping vigorously over the back-office table during the quieter periods of trade.
The third sales assistant was Harry, a struggling actor in his forties. He knew his wines and was always opening a bottle when we were alone on an evening shift. “Education is the key to everything my lad,” he would explain, easing the cork out of a superlative Rioja and splashing each of us a generous glass. It was perfectly normal to drink on duty – we were obliged to open sample bottles for customers, and a few half glasses of wine dotted around the shop added to the atmosphere of authority and professionalism.
After a couple of months, Terry increased my hours. As the only other full-time member of staff, I had soon taken over all his administrative functions. Terry was only too happy to leave everything to me while he studied the Racing Post, munched on doner kebabs and chain-smoked his way through his Lambert & Butler. I would place the orders on the primitive stock computer, check in deliveries from the depot and carry out regular inventory checks to see what had been stolen (mainly Lambert & Butler cigarettes).
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