Scoundrels

by Victor Cornwall

  “Sounds interesting,” I said to Trevelyan.

  “Does it?” he replied, distractedly poking his eye. “This is going to have to come out again isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  Neither of us could have predicted the journey we were about to embark on.

  Remember Billy Fitzjohn? He had a good war until he was shot in the thigh during the retreat from Burma. You’ll be pleased to hear that years later I saw him wearing a leg-brace in Fortnum & Mason, and on your behalf I pushed him down the food hall staircase. He crashed head first into their display of Yule logs and made a fool of himself, the dumb bugger.

  Your face never really looked the same again. But as we still hold the all-time record for Snatch the Gander it was a price worth paying.

  Although I am glad it was you who paid it.

  Yours sincerely,

  Major Victor Cornwall

  Nimbu Towers

  Pullen-under-Lyme

  Gloucestershire

  25th September 2016

  Dear Major,

  Thank you for an interesting and informative account of our schooldays. Being Dunce was a great honour and I can still feel those wounds as if they were freshly made on my skull only yesterday.

  Scoundrels had a great number of recruiting people at the schools, regiments and prisons so that if anyone with the right qualities came along, Lunk Snr would get a phone call alerting him. Boothroyd saw we had what it takes.

  This chapter is one I really enjoyed writing. Please find an account of our recruitment to Scoundrels.

  __________

  CHAPTER 6

  Scoundrels Club

  Piccadilly, 1938

  My cab swept across three lanes of Piccadilly traffic, and into the lay-by. Another cab had been aiming for the same gap in the traffic. Wheels clashed with a spark, and the other cab cracked its radiator. The drivers exchanged angry words as I fumbled for the fare and my driver opened my door deferentially. He waved my money away, and touched his cap. “No charge for Scoundrels, sir.”

  Nodding a confused thanks I gazed up at a six floor Regency townhouse, beautifully kept. It was curiously serene against the bustling backdrop of one of the West End’s busiest thoroughfares. The brickwork was immaculately pointed. There was fresh white paint on the windowpanes and black paint on the iron railings that surrounded the building like the stakes of a motte and bailey castle. Three granite steps led up to a colossal black door, to the right of which was a brass nameplate with the single word, Scoundrels, upon it.

  In front of the door, and nearly obscuring it, stood a man-mountain in impeccable grey livery. His ears were entirely cauliflowered, and I could tell he was trying to look down his nose at me but it had been broken so many times that this was impossible.

  Clutching my letter, I was about to approach this behemoth, who I did not yet know as the dishonoured Armenian hammer throwing champion Aram-Atsi, when I was abruptly thumped between the shoulder-blades, and all the breath went out of me. I turned to find Cornwall gurning at me like a cinema cigarette girl trying to make a sale. The breath went out of me even more.

  “Hullo Trevelyan,” grinned Cornwall. “Going inside?”

  “Don’t tell me…”

  He held up a letter, identical to the one in my hand. There was a wax seal upon it, broken. He smiled, always so punchable. “Any idea what this is about? Wish I’d known you had one too. We could have come down together.”

  “That would have been nice.”

  __________

  Boothroyd had emerged from the shadows of the cloisters that morning as we headed chapel-wards, to pull me aside and pass me the letter. It was as stiff, white and formal as a winged collar.

  The look in his eye had been almost avuncular. “Big day for you Trevelyan,” he’d said. “Try not to make a hash of it.” I’d been expecting a usual school day, but instead I’d been pinged to attend ‘a meeting about your future’ signed by one Mr Ajulo Adawele Lunk Snr, Membership and Operations Secretary, Scoundrels Club, Piccadilly. I’d had to rush to make the train to London.

  All the way to Paddington I’d been wondering at that word ‘membership’. I hadn’t applied to join any club. I had my last year at Winstowe to complete, and then my family estate to look after. I had mulled over university, or perhaps joining up – given that newspapers spoke of nothing but the coming war. But I had decided to leave all decisions until I’d finished school. And what was Scoundrels anyhow? The address was impressive. It wasn’t a club like Whites or The Army & Navy, or I’d have heard of it. Perhaps it was a grand charitable institution, or even an upscale stockbroker, trying to get Nimbu’s account for itself. Possibly it was something to do with friends of my dear late father. I’d decided the best thing was to give a good account of myself, see what I could get out of it, and then retire to Heavy Betsy’s on Dean St, a place Bertie Ravenscroft had told me about.

  Except that now it looked like I’d have to share this gift of an evening with Cornwall, a millstone around my neck, a thorn in my side, a pain in my arse. I was still angry with him for his lack of protection during Snatch the Gander.

  Aram-Atsi plucked the letter from me. In his hand it looked more like a business card. The red wax seal was evidently enough for him as he flexed his massive shoulders to swing open the grand black door and motioned Cornwall and me inside.

  It was palatial. A double-height vestibule, floored with Dolomite marble. There was a rosewood octagonal table with newspapers and periodicals scattered carelessly across it. In the middle of the table, on a plinth, sat a skull wearing a fez. A label identified the skull as that of Alexander the Great.

  I glanced at some of the pictures on the wall, noting a colourful Modigliani of an elongated woman pleasuring herself. I also noticed what looked like a Leonardo cartoon showing a design for a roast chicken deboning machine, but it couldn’t have been, as it wasn’t even framed. It had just been carelessly stuck on the wall with pins as if it were a notice about a cricket fixture.

  William Morris wallpaper ran all the way around the vestibule to a colossal fireplace, inside of which some kind of giant ungulate – a caribou? a tapir? – was being turned on a spit-roast by a chef in whites. On the other side stood a ravishing woman in an Athenian gown. She bowed demurely to Cornwall and me, and bid us sign the Visitors’ Book. We wrote our names on a fresh page with a fountain pen.

  This goddess explained that if we were “unsuccessful in our application,” the page would be removed, and it would be as if we had never come. Then she turned and led us toward a staircase. We passed a display case containing a lifesize model of a French soldier in Napoleonic dress, fierce with his musket and pillbox hat. I realised with a start that it was not a model.

  “He doesn’t bite,” she said, leading us up the stairs, “anymore.”

  Our goddess knocked on a padded leather door and stood aside. Cornwall and I walked in, and stood uncertainly at the threshold of an immensely long room, perhaps forty yards in all. Sunlight flooded in from a series of floor-to-ceiling windows on our right. There was hardly any furniture to disrupt the herringbone parquet floor, which flowed on and on, perfectly. At the far end of the room, framed by thick red velvet curtains, sat three men behind a single desk.

  “Come,” barked a distant voice. I could see a raised hand, beckoning. We walked towards the desk.

  “Stop there,” called the man in the middle when we reached the centre of the room, which still left us about twenty yards away from them. The man on the left rose, and clopped slowly over to a cabinet at the side of the room, each footstep a gunshot. “Drink?”

  “…”

  “…”

  “Wouldn’t you like a phlegm-cutter chaps? It must have been a long journey,” he said, mixing three large drinks, and turning to face us.

  “Excuse me, but aren’t yo
u…” I faltered.

  “Would you be, sir,” Cornwall took up, “are you in fact, umm, the…”

  “King? I might well be,” said George VI, “but that doesn’t really answer my question.”

  From the desk, one of the seated men called, “two more over here George.”

  The King walked two of the drinks back over to the seated men, Lunk Snr and Jack Dempsey, the ex-heavyweight boxing champion of the world. They took them with neither comment nor thanks. They didn’t even meet His Majesty’s eye. They were too busy scoping out Cornwall and me, stern and unsmiling.

  George VI returned for his own drink, a heady cocktail known as a Widow’s Kiss, which the Winstowe Common Room had tried to scrabble together one night last term. It was two parts Calvados to one part Benedictine and one part yellow Chartreuse with a dash of bitters.

  George VI sat back down at the desk at the end of the room. A long silence ensued, during which the two gentlemen and the King sat back on squeaking chairs, enjoying their drinks as we stood awkwardly in the middle of the room.

  I cleared my throat, a noise that echoed around the room. “Actually, I think I’ll have the same please.”

  “And for me,” Cornwall said.

  King George got up again and headed back over to the drinks cabinet, housed in a long container that I now saw was an Egyptian sarcophagus of smooth black stone. We stood in silence in this awkward, echoing room as he mixed our drinks from scratch. This took some time. Then the King brought them all the way over to us, his brogues clipping loudly. I nodded.

  Cornwall did a sort of curtsey.

  The King nodded back and prowled the twenty yards to the desk to sit down.

  I took an exploratory sip of my Widow’s Kiss that had been served in a coupe of exceptional thinness and roundness. The glass was almost the size of an association football. There was nowhere to put it down, so I held onto it.

  King George sipped his drink and simply stared at us. Dempsey did the same. Then Lunk Snr, a broad Nigerian gentleman with a crown of grey hair, reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a foot long Cohiba. He snipped the end off it with a cutter and spent a good three minutes contentedly sucking and puffing it into life. Jack Dempsey looked at him with a wrinkled nose, as if Lunk had broken wind.

  Lunk settled down contentedly, ignoring Dempsey. In fact, his appraising eyes never left the pair of us. An age later, King George VI absent-mindedly patted his own pockets and pulled out his own smokes. He lit one and blew a perfect ring into the air. The way it hung there, like a halo, illustrated just how still the air was.

  Cornwall and I continued to stand in the middle of the room. I’m not sure about Cornwall, but I felt oddly lumpen and uneasy. Maybe it was the alcohol, or the gaze of these men, or the fact that the King had just served us, but I had absolutely no idea what was expected of me.

  “I say Trevelyan, would you like a cigarette?” said Jack Dempsey.

  “I suppose I would,” I said, evenly.

  Lunk Snr said in a voice so deep it was felt rather than heard, “And you Cornwall? Would you care for a cigarette as well?”

  “Indeed I would,” said Cornwall.

  “Sort that out George,” said Jack Dempsey.

  The King stood up and walked the never-ending twenty yards over to us again. He offered me a cigarette from a brand I’d never seen before, Faustus’ Pact No 2. He offered one to Cornwall.

  King George patted his pockets absent-mindedly. Tutting at his own mistake, he walked all the way back over to the desk to pick up the matches. He then retraced his steps over to us once more. He struck a match and cupped his hands so I could take his light.

  The King smiled at me pleasantly, nodded, and walked all the way back to sit behind the desk again.

  The three men lapsed back into silence as they appraised us once more, standing there in the middle of the long room. I took great care to try to remain composed as I smoked. Something was afoot, but I still had no clue what. I looked about the room for an ashtray but could not see one. I took a sip of my drink, careful not to smash the perilously thin glass with my teeth. I thought about making a comment about the weather, or some other small talk but something made me stay silent.

  Minutes stuttered by. An ormolu clock ticked steadily from its grand position over the fireplace. It seemed to be getting louder and louder. I began to feel a little woozy, and wasn’t entirely sure the floor was completely level any more.

  Then Lunk rummaged in his waistcoat and consulted his half-hunter. He cleared his throat, before saying in a sonorous voice, “Trevelyan, Cornwall. You have both been given a small dose of a muscle relaxant derived from the common foxglove. It’s rarely fatal, but it can really slow down your reactions. The antidote is in the pocket of the Persian gentleman you’re about to meet.”

  My hands were full, ditto Cornwall’s, with drinks in one hand and cigarettes in the other. So when the swordsman stepped out from behind the heavy window curtains, we weren’t best placed to defend ourselves. But the surprise cleared my head instantly.

  He skipped across the floorboards in soft shoes, attacking hard from my left side with a shining scimitar that caught the chandelier lights just enough for me to duck reflexively as the blade whistled over my head. Luck, rather than judgment, saw me toss my drink, glass and all, at our attacker’s face. The alcohol saturated his billowing silken robes, checking him for a brief moment. By this time Cornwall had dropped his cigarette in surprise but its glowing end gave him an idea. As the swordsman came forward again, Cornwall managed to chip-kick the cigarette up at him and the glowing ember set his tunic ablaze. Soon the man was merrily on fire. Cornwall and I looked at each other. What the devil was going on with these people?

  After lurching around for a bit, the swordsman stumbled close to an open window, so I simply closed him down and shoulder-barged him out. Cornwall threw his scimitar after him and drew the curtains.

  Jack Dempsey stretched languidly in his chair, before enquiring “and the antidote?”

  “I’m not sure there is an antidote for the common foxglove, sir,” I said. “If we’ve had any of that, we’re as good as dead.”

  “Our chemistry master, Dr. Boothroyd, explained that,” added Cornwall.

  Lunk Snr continued to puff away at his cigar. He said “glad you were listening.” He didn’t confirm whether we’d been poisoned or not, but I began to suspect that we hadn’t.

  The King had a question. “Did either of you note that man’s tattoo?” I replied that on his inner left bicep there had been a small blue scorpion.

  “Obviously,” said Lunk Snr, “but did you notice the one on his right index finger?”

  “Please excuse me for a moment,” said Cornwall, already on his way out of the room.

  I stood there. I could have asked a hundred indignant questions about the last few minutes, but again something told me not to. What I did do was stride over to the sarcophagus and fix myself another Widow’s Kiss, and when I motioned to the three men, Dempsey nodded that yes, he’d have another. The fixing of this quite complex drink allowed me to get my pulse down, and the room became quiet again, more affably this time. King George examined his perfect fingernails and blew another smoke ring.

  Four minutes later, Dempsey’s drink delivered, Cornwall came back with a white napkin covered in blood. There was more blood on his sleeves. He approached the desk and rummaged in the napkin. “I think his other tattoo says ‘death to idolaters’ in Farsi, sir,” he said, and placed the severed finger on the table.

  “So it does,” said Lunk Snr., barely glancing at it. “How d’you know that?”

  Cornwall replied that his father had made him learn basic Farsi script as a punishment for shooting the tail from a Shetland pony. George thought this was funny.

  “So, Trevelyan, do you trust this chap with your li
fe?” he called out.

  “Of course not,” I said. “Clearly it’s each man for himself, and it’s useless to pretend otherwise. But, your Majesty,” I added, “I’d trust him with yours.”

  Dempsey smiled. Lunk Snr made a great ‘ha!’ noise. King George jumped to his feet, rushed past us with an approving glance, and called back over his shoulder.

  “Good. Swear them in.”

  And that was it, apparently. We were now Scoundrels.

  Jack Dempsey got up and approached. He thumped us each once in the chest, a blow that I can still feel all these years later. Then he shook our hands, and left us with Lunk Snr to complete our orientation.

  Ajulo Adawele Lunk Snr was already in his late sixties and had been M.O.S. since the turn of the century. He picked up his Cohiba, and bid us sit down in some plush armchairs at the other end of the long room.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, sir,” I enquired, “could you explain exactly of what we have just become members?”

  Lunk drew on his cigar and waited for the shroud of smoke to clear.

  “Our club looks for certain natural qualities,” he said, looking up towards the frescos on the ceiling. “It’s difficult to pin down. It is not that the pair of you have the qualifications,” he continued evenly, “it is that you don’t have the disqualifications.”

  We learned that the attacking swordsman was a member-elect of the Nizari Hashashin, a Crusader-era sect of assassins, who lent sparring partners to the Club and with whom Scoundrels had a friendly professional relationship. Lunk remarked that we had done well to fend off his attack, showing great “teamsmanship” to do so, but that we’d really excelled by defenestrating him so elegantly. Upon my enquiry, Lunk briefly excused himself, returning with news that the swordsman had broken both his arms in the fall, and bore us no ill will for the loss of his finger.

  We learned that Lunk’s son, Tiberius Lunk, who had left Winstowe a few years earlier, had been a Scoundrel for the last five years and was being groomed to take over from his father one day. We knew of Tiberius because he had accepted places to study at St Peter’s College, Oxford (Chemistry) Queens’ College, Cambridge (Greats) and also University College, London (Russian and Arabic). At present he travelled between all three universities when he wasn’t in training as the first string English tight-head prop. Cornwall mentioned that he had a half-memory of being in a Remove games lesson, when Tiberius had thrown him straight over the posts of the First XV pitch, and caught him as he came back down on the other side.