by Mark Evans
‘Just trying to be helpful,’ my evil guardian said, his tone caramel smooth yet simultaneously burned-gravy cruel. ‘Now, come on, have a glass of wine.’
‘No! Leave us alone!’
‘No? Then how about a digestif? A glass of Eau de Mort, perhaps?’
‘Ooh, that sounds delicious! Yes, please!’ Harry could not restrain himself; but I could restrain him and did so as he reached for the almost certainly deadly liquid Mr Benevolent now offered.
‘Mr Benevolent, please leave us.’ I clenched my fists in preparation to dismiss him by force if necessary.
‘I will not leave you,’ he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down between Pippa and Mr Parsimonious. ‘Hello, Pippa Bin. You’ll be eighteen very soon, and ripe for marriage.’
He reached out his hand to stroke hers but, strong and fine-spirited filly that she was, she took up a fork and started to poke him with it. ‘Leave me alone, you fiend!’
‘Oh, yes, poke me with your fork. I embrace its tine-y pain. Yes, you’ll make a splendid temporary wife who will die suspiciously young.’ He then turned to Mr Parsimonious. ‘Hello, Parsimonious. Happy to be out of the workhouse?’
‘You monster! It is your fault I was in there!’
‘Lost your generous spirit, have you?’
‘No! Have this slap to the face! And this punch in the stomach! And this grrr and this aaarrggh and this I-hate-you!’ Mr Parsimonious now tried to do these things, but Mr Benevolent caught his would-be slapping, punching hands and at his fierce cries merely laughed.
‘Ha, ha, ha!’
Oh, that laugh! So tri-syllabically innocent in print! So evil-toned and dismissively cruel in person!
Each ‘ha’ was like a spike to Mr Parsimonious’s soul and he seemed to wither before the mocking onslaught, like a temperate-climate plant that has somehow wound up in the desert. He shrivelled and writhed and tears welled in his eyes until he had to hide under the table lest anyone witness his illegal weeping.
Fortunately at this point the waiting staff approached with our crispy elephant starter, and Mr Benevolent stood again, a smile of malicious accomplishment on his face. ‘Seeing as we’re in public and I can’t do anything too evil, I shall leave you to enjoy your meal. But watch out, Pip Bin, for I shall have my vengeance on you.’ He headed back across the restaurant to his table, but after a few steps turned and addressed me: ‘Incidentally, your mother sends her love. Or would do if she wasn’t still as loopy as a mad rollercoaster.’
‘Mother! Where is she, you monster?’
‘Where is she? You really want to know?’
‘I do.’ I thrust my chest out and squared off with him, though there may have been a touch of rhombusing off as well.
‘Then I shall tell you. She is— But no! Why spoil all my fun? Goodbye, Pip Bin. See you around . . . Ha, ha, ha!’
He left, his evil laugh trailing behind him, and I stared after him with hate in my heart, loathing in my lungs and a good dose of spite in my spleen.
‘And now, sir, we will prepare your crispy deep-fried elephant before your very eyes.’
The waiter clapped his hands for his assistants to start cooking. With a terrific trumpeting and huge sizzling, they toppled the elephant into a vast pot of boiling oil and, as my ears filled with the fearful, agonized cries of a soon-to-be delicioused-up pachyderm, I decided that it was very much a metaphor for my situation: surely I was as the elephant, poised delicately above the boiling oil that was Mr Benevolent.
And then I realized that it was much easier simply to de-metaphor and say: I hated Mr Benevolent, yet feared him also.
1 He means Llongy-wongy-barely-pronounceable-pentre-cwm-y-gwyn-maes-parciobach-and-pant-cudd-heddlu-llyn-toiledau-ar-gyfyl-yr-Wyddfa, which translates as ‘incredibly long and hard to pronounce valley village of the little white car park and hidden dip in the road police lake toilets near Mount Snowdon’. It’s not as long as the other place.
2 Old French dish, being porpoise cooked in dolphin sauce.
3 Until wartime rationing, you could get wine in almost any colour, including tartan.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIFTH
From riches nearly right back to rags again
The next weeks were a blur of activity and being rich. There was a house to furnish and a life to set in motion. I commissioned the finest furniture in London, all fine mahogany, teak and leg-oak,1 and had fine clothes of finery made for us all: Harry and I looked quite the dandies about town with our silk cravats, brocade waistcoats, gold-trimmed trousers and pewter hats, Mr Parsimonious was restored to sartorial businessman glory and Pippa had dresses so grand and wide that I had to have special doors constructed for the house that she might fit through them.
I also used my new money to have Pippa’s anvil retrieved from the church we had left it in; it was now mounted in a cabinet in the entrance hall of our house, a memorial to our father and to the help it had been in our various escapes.
There was also the small matter of a large celebration, for during this period I attained the age of eighteen – an age that had so recently seemed a destination I was unlikely to reach. We dined and drank and danced – all the fun d words basically, including those traditional eighteenth-birthday rites of passage, dog-dunking, duck-defeathering and dame-dangling.2
I was now free of the bonds of Mr Benevolent’s guardianship and, until my absent presumed-dead-but-just-possibly-still-alive father returned, I was also the man of the family with the concomitant responsibility for our financial security, so I sought investment advice from an old friend.
‘As my father’s business partner, you helped him to a fortune, Mr Parsimonious. Now you must help me to invest wisely that we may all live free of the tedium of work and real life.’
‘Oh! It would be an honour to serve, young Pip.’ His cheeks shone with flattered glee and wobbled with financial acumen. ‘You have some hundred and eighty pounds remaining to invest. What income would you like from it?’
‘Perhaps fifteen pounds a year?’
‘Living high on the hog and tall on the tiger indeed!’ He furrowed his brow in thought. ‘Hmm, I’m sure I can come up with something.’
He immediately set to work, thinking, researching and pondering.3 But my approach to him had ruffled feathers elsewhere – though not on our pet duck as it was still completely bald from the defeathering I mentioned some paragraphs ago.
It was Harry whose feathers were ruffled – he’d got into the habit of wearing jaunty boas instead of cravats – for he felt I should have consulted him as well. ‘I have so many ideas and schemes for making money, Pip Bin!’
‘But, Harry . . .’ In truth I was still a tiny bit cross and a big bit angry about the uselessness of his earlier school-escaping plans.
‘You could buy a printing press and then we could just print more whenever we needed.’
‘That would be illegal, Harry. What other ideas do you have?’
‘That was the main one.’ He thought carefully for a second or two. ‘Though how about we let two five-pound notes get married and then they can have lots of little one-pound-note children?’
‘Why, Harry, that is a brilliant idea!’
‘Is it?’ To give him credit, he did sound surprised at my use of the word ‘brilliant’.
‘No.’
‘Ah.’
Fortunately, Mr Parsimonious rapidly came up with several incredibly wise-sounding investment opportunities. ‘I have discovered a Prussian mining concern that is seeking to sell shares so they may exploit a recent discovery.’
‘Of what?’ I asked, intrigued.
‘They have discovered rich seams of mustard and custard. Basically all the yellow rhyming liquids.’4
‘That sounds interesting.’ It did. How could such a venture fail? Wherever people ate meat they would need mustard and wherever they ate pudding they would need custard. ‘Anything else?’
‘You could invest in property. After all, bricks and mortar never go out of fa
shion!’
‘True, true. Tell me more.’
‘A company needs stockholders for house-building bonds, which will employ a simple series of leased remortgages paying back ninepence on the capital sum with an amortized bond of seven per cent of the accrued interest in the contractual monies of the loaned stipendiary fiscalization.’
‘Is that good?’
‘Well . . . it sounds like proper businessy talk, so probably.’ He looked at the paperwork he held in his hand. ‘And the company is the reputable firm of Crookit, Ripoff and Wouldn’t-if-I-were-you.’
‘As solid a trio of names as I have ever heard! What else?’
‘Investors are sought for a new gentlemen’s club where men may enjoy smoking huge cigars in the rarefied atmosphere of newly discovered natural gas.’
‘A fine mix of leisure and science! How clever we British are!’
‘And then lastly a chap called Stephenson needs money to build a device he is calling a “steam locomotive”, but that’s just madness I tell you, madness.’
‘Hmm . . .’ My head teemed with these fascinating financial possibilities. ‘I have decided! I shall invest my money equally in all of them.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I am. All except that “steam locomotive” nonsense. The only money I’ll spend on that is on a specially commissioned advertisement in The Times announcing to the world that Mr Stephenson is a fool, a dunderhead and a numpty!’
So my monetary dispositions were made; and I sat back to await the waves of cash that would inevitably come rolling in, like a glorious tide of lucre.
Oops.
For my investments did not go well. It was as if the moon had suddenly left the sky and with it its tide-creating gravity: no lucre rolled in.
Though much rolled out.
Day by day the news became worse. First came word from my mining investments. It turned out that they had not discovered actual mustard but instead only fool’s mustard, looking the same but tasting of absolutely nothing;5 and though they had found real custard it was so delicious that the workers in the mine ate it all, smuggling in crumbles, pies and sponges to have with it.
The company went bankrupt, and I lost my investment.
Next to turn rotten was the property deal. I first got a hint that all was not well when I took a carriage ride out to see the houses I had invested in being built. They were supposed to fill twenty acres of reclaimed marshland in the East End, but when I arrived I could see no houses. On looking closer, however, I did see some. Tiny ones, no more than a foot high, inhabitable by no one taller than four inches, maybe five, if they didn’t mind smacking their head on doorframes a lot, and therefore, given that the shortest person in Britain at the time was music-hall sensation Miniature Michael, who stood eighteen inches high, inhabitable by no one.
I had put my money into a scheme that turned out to be a whopping great lie.6
The company claimed they were not technically in breach of contract as, despite their size, they had built the specified number of houses, and the courts agreed.
The company directors made a fortune, and again I lost my investment.
As I left the court after the verdict, I consoled myself with the thought that at least my share in the new cigar and gas club would pay me richly; indeed, I realized it was the opening day and hurried there for a relaxing gassy cigar.
As I approached down the great thoroughfare of Piccadilly, I heard the hiss of the gas being switched on and the immortal words, ‘Gentlemen, light your cigars.’
Then I heard a massive explosion, and in it the sound of all my money burning away.
For a third time I had lost my investment.
To cap it all, as I turned my back on the smouldering ruins of the club, I passed a news stand, where a boy was touting his newsy wares. ‘Extra, extra, read all about it – if you can, which you probably can’t given the appalling literacy rates in this country at this time!’ He paused for breath, then continued: ‘Mr Stephenson’s Rocket breaks land speed record, invention of the railways, a mass transportation network and economic boom bound to follow! Investors will make huge amounts! Non-investors won’t!’
Ah, I thought. Then: ‘Aaarrgggh!!!’
I raced home to find a shame-faced Mr Parsimonious pacing frantically and babbling like the guilty man he was.
‘It is all my fault! All mine!’
‘Oh, come now, Mr Parsimonious. You advised me in good faith and could not have known what would happen.’
‘I fear recent events of misery have addled my business brain.’ He sighed deeply and regretfully. ‘Once I was an expert. Now I am but an ex-expert.’
‘Your advice was good, Mr P. Just a little bit the exact opposite of what it should have been. Which is a skill in itself.’ I went to pour myself a stiff drink before hearing the answer to the question I was about to pose. ‘Even after all these set-backs, we’re still all right for money, aren’t we?’
‘Alas . . .’ At that warning word I set aside the drink I had poured and picked up the entire bottle instead. ‘. . . you have lost everything.’
‘Everything?’ Although I was trying to maintain control, there was a definite quaver to my voice.
‘Yes. You have nothing left.’
‘Then I am poor again?’ Now the quaver became a distinct wobble of fear.
‘I am afraid so.’
‘I see.’ I downed the bottle in one, which steadied my voice and hardened my will. ‘I tell you this: I shall not go back to the workhouse on pain of death! There must be a way out of this situation – and I shall find it!’
1 A tree that had the misfortune to grow its trunk and branches in the shape of table-legs and was therefore completely deforested in the nineteenth century, along with the bookcase elm, the washstand larch and the wardrobe sycamore.
2 You were not truly a man in nineteenth-century England until you had dropped a dog in a bath, plucked a live duck and held a pantomime dame out of the window by his-her ankle. Or you could just go abroad and kill a lot of people in the name of the King.
3 The great philosopher Jeremy Bentham was famous for his habit of thinking while pacing round a pond, or pond-wandering as he called it; this was contracted to form the word ‘pondering’.
4 Modern Germany still has half the world’s mustard reserves; the Germans’ love of sausages comes from the economic need to have something to eat with the mustard. Geological custard is made when prehistoric eggs, milk and sugar are trapped between layers of rock, the pressure turning them into deliciousness.
5 There is a huge modern market for fool’s mustard in America.
6 The area of the scheme was known as ‘Whopping Great Lie Land’, which, over the years, contracted and corrupted to ‘Wapping’.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH
Up by the bootstraps, up, up and away!
Despite the fact that he had ruined us, I could hold no feelings of anger or resentment towards Mr Parsimonious. Though I did once sort of accidentally punch him.
And twice sort of deliberately.
I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a bit of frustrated kicking too.
And I called him things I am ashamed of now.
Things I shall not put down in a book that perchance families may read.
Suffice to say they were quite rude.
But he was a jolly, robust sort and, though bruised, he survived my aggrieved assaults, indeed often thanking me for them. No, really, he did.
I quickly decided that we must all find jobs, but the question was, of what kind?
‘Is there money to be made by being pretty?’ asked Pippa, over breakfast one morning.
At this, Mr Parsimonious and Harry coughed awkwardly and seemed to find something incredibly interesting to stare at in their porridge.
‘There is, dear sister. Sadly, I fear not in a wholesome way. Indeed, possibly only in a distinctly dodgy way.’
‘As long as it made money . . .’
‘I fo
rbid it!’ I slammed my hand on the table in a pretty darned manly man-of-the-family way.
‘Very well. Then I shall take up my anvil once more and manufacture footwear for the animals. I’m sure they will pay handsomely for shoes.’
I knew not of any animals that would do so, having neither the pockets to carry a wallet or purse, nor the opposable thumb to open one, but it was better than the unsavoury options open to her otherwise. ‘An excellent idea, dear sister. Once again Papa’s gift will aid us.’ Now I turned to Harry, slightly dreading what job he might have decided to do. ‘Harry Biscuit, what about you?’
‘Well, I have been keenly researching the job market and have made a decision.’ Could it be a sensible one by any chance? ‘Therefore I have decided to take to the music-hall stage with an act entitled “Harry Biscuit: The Human Swan”. Fame and fortune await!’
I had been right to dread the job he had chosen and wrong to hope that it might be a sensible one, but did not want to discourage him so merely said, ‘Well . . . good luck with that, Harry.’
‘Meanwhile I have decided to set up as a business adviser.’ This seemed rash from Mr Parsimonious, given his recent efforts in ruining me. ‘I shall offer people advice and then run after them, begging them to do the opposite of what I just said.’
That seemed much more sensible, though still mad.
‘What about you, Pip Bin? What are you going to do?’ asked Harry.
‘I have got the best idea of all of us. For I have decided that I shall become a best-selling novelist,’ I announced.
There was silence in the room – doubtless caused by admiration for my clever idea – until it was broken by Harry. ‘Is that going to make lots of money?’
‘Of course. Bound to. Loads of people do it. How hard can it be to write a novel?’
Again there was an awed silence at my cleverness so, taking advantage of it, I left the room and retreated to my study. Brimming with confidence, I sat down at my desk, quill pen in hand, blank sheet of paper before me, and began.
