by Ruth Edwards
I rise at eleven, I dine about two,
I get drunk before seven, and the next thing I do
I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap
I dally about her, and spew in her lap;
There we quarrel and scold, till I fall asleep,
When the bitch growing bold, to my pocket does creep;
Then slyly she leaves me, and, to revenge the affront
At once she bereaves me to money and cunt.
If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk
What a coil do I make for the loss of my punk
I storm, and I roar, and I fall in a rage
And missing my lass, I fall on my page:
Then crop-sick all morning, I rail at my men,
And in bed I lie yawning till eleven again.
Milton laughed and passed the poem to Pooley. ‘I presume I shouldn’t take this as a literal record of members’ behaviour, sir.’
‘No. But you get the tone.’
‘Indeed I do. When did the change begin to occur?’
‘Hard to tell,’ said the Admiral. ‘It’s all very mysterious. I went there pretty regularly on and off on shore-leave during the early and middle fifties. Then I was attached to the Foreign Office in various postings as a defence attaché. I had years in Latin America, the Far East, all over the place, and any time I came back to London, well, there was too much to do to have much time for somewhere like ffeatherstonehaugh’s, and anyway I was married by then and my wife wouldn’t have approved. Any entertaining I had to do in London was in the United Services Club. I saw ffeatherstonehaugh’s as a young man’s club, and kept up my subscription purely for sentimental reasons. Inflation made it a negligible amount, in any case.’
‘Sorry, sir. I don’t quite follow that.’
‘There was a rule that one’s subscription never went up from whatever it was the year you joined. Of course that should have been altered when inflation became serious, but it wasn’t. I pay forty pounds a year, about a twelfth of a normal club subscription.’ He sucked fruitlessly on his now extinct pipe, laid it down on the table beside him, got up, and turning his back on his visitors, wandered over to the window. ‘A couple of years ago I thought I might get involved again. I’d retired by this time. I’d been living in the country with my wife when she died unexpectedly. As you can imagine I was at a bit of a loose end. Decided to move up to town. Didn’t really fancy staying in the country on my own. Got these chambers, looked round for something to do. I’ve always been a bit of an organiser, so when I looked in on ffeatherstonehaugh’s, started to go regularly and saw that things seemed to be in a bit of a mess, it seemed to me I might usefully give it some of my time.’
‘When you say “a bit of a mess”?’
‘Come on, Chief Superintendent. You’ve seen what it’s like. There aren’t a quarter of the members there are supposed to be. Do you know why? It’s because subscriptions for new members are set at fifteen hundred pounds to make sure no one joins. The servants are treated like slaves. There’s no life in the club any more. It’s more like a luxurious rest-home for geriatrics, except rather than them paying the club, the club is essentially paying them. There’s actually a rule that members of the general committee don’t have to pay for meals. I smelled several rats immediately.’
‘Commander Blenkinsop? Was he able to help you?’
The Admiral wheeled round and emitted a loud snort. ‘Pinkie? That bollocks.’ He threw up his hands. ‘He’d gone to pot. Sold out. Secretary indeed. He should have been put up against a wall and shot, if you ask me, for dereliction of duty. I was ashamed that I’d written a reference for him when he applied for that job. It’s always a bit of a shock when you find your friends lack moral fibre.’
‘But was he not pleased to see you back?’
‘He was, until he got a whiff of what I was planning to do. But at least he didn’t spot that until he’d got me on the committee.’
‘How does the system work?’
‘It’s a travesty,’ said the Admiral. ‘The old system was fine. Just the way Lord ffeatherstonehaugh wanted it. With a good, happy and well-looked-after staff and a first-class butler in charge of everything, all you needed was a committee of half a dozen blokes who were elected by popular vote to keep an eye on things and keep things lively, come up with new ideas, that sort of stuff. That’s how it was when I joined first. Now they’ve managed to get round the popular vote. There’s a new system. Any vacancies on the committee, they co-opt somebody new—someone like themselves of course. Elections happen every year, yes, but it’s always the standing committee that gets elected. Not surprising really. It’s the club secretary that counts the votes under the supervision of the committee.’
‘So they fiddle the results?’
‘Certainly. How else could a crowd of deadbeats like that have kept control all these years?’ He sat down again and began to refill his pipe.
‘And for some reason they thought you were a fellow deadbeat?’
‘I enjoyed playing that role. Always had a penchant for amateur dramatics.’ The Admiral set fire to his tobacco. ‘That was easy enough. All you did was sit round like some old colonel in an Agatha Christie book, bellowing about the country going to the dogs. I didn’t show my true colours until they made me chairman. That was what I’d had my eye on. Suppose it was a bit sneaky really.’ He seemed unabashed.
‘But how did you get to be chairman? What happened to your predecessor?’ asked Milton.
‘Glastonbury? He was pushed out. Not that he’s the worst of them, poor old devil. Just not in touch with it half the time. For a long time it suited the others to have him in that job. You see, they all run their own little fiefdoms. Fagg has provender, fattening the members and starving the staff. Fishbane buys the dirty books for the library. We don’t need a wine committee. Nobody’s interested in laying down wine for the future, when they’re dead: instead they’re all drinking up what’s been in the cellar for decades. But we do have a committee nevertheless. It’s run by that old ruffian, Chatterton. My guess is he’s been selling off some of the better vintages over the past few years.’
‘I haven’t come across him.’ Milton looked puzzled.
‘He’s probably not back from his latest gambling trip. Monte Carlo I think he was going to this time. Quite impressive to afford that on an academic’s pension.’
‘Why did they make you chairman?’ asked Milton.
‘Mainly because they are (a) too idle, too stupid, too drunk or too arrogant to see through me and (b) because there was a bit of work to be done. I tipped the wink to a pal of mine who’s big in local government, and he managed to fix it for someone from the public health authority to write a letter full of threats and demands and legal gobbledegook. The committee became so unnerved at the thought that the club premises might be under threat that when I said I knew how to deal with these bounders, but it could only be as chairman, they swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Glastonbury was out. I don’t think he even noticed. I was in. They’d made a mistake. Once I was in that job, I started looking to see where the bodies were buried.’
He sat upright. ‘I left the committee alone. My first objective was to get rid of Blenkinsop. I did that by straightforward blackmail. He’d been fiddling. Not in a very big way, but I’ve got an eye for that sort of thing and I told him I wouldn’t split on him if he resigned and helped me choose the successor I wanted. That’s how we got Trueman. Fagg and company were upset about Blenkinsop going, but since they trusted him utterly they left it to him to choose someone just like himself. So three months ago the club ended up with an efficient and honest chairman and secretary.’
‘Must have come as something of a shock to the old brigade,’ said Milton.
‘Well, we didn’t make it too apparent immediately.’ The Admiral sat back and blew a few reflective smoke rings. ‘The first step is to get the evidence, as you will know yourself. Then you act. So we let them go on in their grubby lit
tle greedy ways while we looked at papers and account books and took an inventory of the wine-cellar and just watched how the system operated.’
‘And Mr. Trueman was a good ally?’
‘Very,’ said the Admiral. ‘A very thorough, honest man. I’m not surprised they killed him.’
Chapter Ten
Amiss was clearing away dirty glasses in the Smoking Room after lunch when he heard the door open and Glastonbury’s voice crying, ‘No, no, Cully. You must be careful or you’ll trip up.’
Glastonbury held the door open while a walking-frame entered at some speed followed by its lean and dapper-looking proprietor. Chatterton made fast progress over to a quartet of comfortable armchairs. He dropped into the nearest one and let the zimmer fall to the ground. Uttering little bleating cries, Glastonbury followed. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, let me put that away, Cully. Anyone could fall over it.’ Fussily he searched for a safe place, finally leaning the contraption against the wall behind his chair before sitting down. Amiss hovered discreetly, curious to see more of Chatterton, whom he had glimpsed only in the distance but who Gooseneck had told him was one of the liveliest members of the club. He had lunched with Glastonbury, whose comparative vivacity had been remarkable.
‘Now, my dear friend, what would you like?’ Glastonbury looked up and saw the hovering Amiss. ‘Ah…Robert, yes, Robert, isn’t it, dear boy.’
‘Sir?’
‘Would you be so kind as to fetch…what?’
‘A decanter of port,’ said Chatterton firmly.
‘Oh, are you sure? Don’t you think you’d be better off with a soft drink? After all, you’ve been travelling today. The port might upset your stomach.’
‘I haven’t had an upset stomach since…let me see, it would have been February the twelfth, nineteen fifty-three, the occasion when I crossed to Biarritz during a storm and threw up into the Channel. It would have been a Wednesday afternoon, if I’m not mistaken. Port it is.’
‘Well now, should I join you? Oh, dear. What d’you think. I might get a headache later in the afternoon.’
‘Get the port,’ said Chatterton to Amiss, ‘and two glasses.’
***
With the arrival ten minutes later of Commander Blenkinsop, Fagg and Fishbane, three more glasses and a second decanter were called for. Having supplied them with a fifth chair, Amiss made them generally comfortable and vanished noiselessly through the nearest door. Constructed as a fake bookcase, this could be unobtrusively left sufficiently ajar for a conversation to be overheard. It was his first opportunity to use his listening post.
‘So how did you get on in frogland?’ enquired Colonel Fagg civilly. ‘Don’t know how you can stick them. Let us down in nineteen-forty.’
‘Trying to take away our sovereignty through the bloody Common Market,’ chimed in the Commander.
‘Good-looking birds, though,’ observed Fishbane. ‘And keen.’
‘I often feel French food is a trifle rich,’ contributed Glastonbury. ‘But still, you had a good rest, didn’t you, Cully?’
‘I didn’t go there for a rest, you silly blighter,’ said Chatterton affectionately. ‘But yes, I enjoyed the change. I could get tired of even roulette if I always played it in the same place.’
‘Must have been very expensive though,’ observed Fagg. ‘I’ve heard it costs pounds to stay in hotels in places like that.’
There was a lull in the conversation.
‘Well, what’s been happening here then?’ asked Chatterton.
The Commander embarked on one of his monologues on the supineness of the Tory government and the unregenerate socialism of the opposition, interrupted only by murmurs of approval from Fagg, who contributed the insight that rioting yobs in a northern city should have been put down by the Gurkhas.
‘Any survivors—put them straight into the army. Give them a short back and sides and give them a taste of the birch. That’d sort them out soon enough. Which reminds me,’ he said, his voice rising to a shout. ‘Where’s that bloody waiter? What’s his name?’
‘Er…em…er…it’s Robert, isn’t it?’ said Glastonbury. ‘He always seems to be very nice.’
‘Insubordinate bounder,’ said Fagg. The port did not appear to be improving his temper.
The bell was rung several times. Amiss allowed half a minute to pass before he pushed open the door and stood in front of the quintet.
‘I thought I told you to get your hair cut,’ bellowed Fagg.
‘I did, sir. I had it cut yesterday.’
‘Doesn’t look like it to me,’ said Fagg. ‘Turn around. Look,’ he announced to the others, ‘it’s over his collar.’
‘That’s the way intellectuals wear their hair,’ said the Commander. To his relief, Amiss detected a genial note in his voice.
‘Pinkie, are you telling me this fellow’s a bloody intellectual? We don’t want his sort here.’
The Commander looked at Amiss and jerked his head towards the door. Amiss departed, leaving the four old men calming down Fagg. After a couple of minutes he heard the familiar clanking sound that indicated that Fagg was taking refuge in the contents of his various pockets and had commenced the process of smearing snuff all over himself and the surrounding furniture.
‘Well, what’s been happening in the club?’ asked Chatterton. ‘Wine, women and song, no doubt.’
‘Oh no, Cully,’ said Glastonbury. ‘It’s been very dull since you left.’
‘Apart from all that hoo-ha about that bloody fellow True man,’ said Fagg.
‘What hoo-ha?’ asked Chatterton. ‘Boy’s already explained what happened and that things were all back to normal since he did himself in. I’m sorry I missed that. It would have been a bit of excitement. I’d have seen it if I’d been coming down the stairs instead of in the lift. This bloody hip…’
‘We’ve had all those impertinent jackanapes around the place,’ said Fagg, ‘implying he might have been pushed.’
‘Pity they don’t spend their time catching criminals,’ observed the Commander, ‘instead of wasting their time harassing respectable citizens.’
A general chorus of approving grunts indicated that this view had been approved unanimously.
‘There’s no question that he jumped, is there?’ asked Chatterton.
‘Course not,’ said Fagg. ‘Bloody neurotic fellow. Twitchy. No sense of judgement. Never trusted him from the first moment. Weaselly-looking creature.’
With the exception of Glastonbury, who produced the occasional ‘Oh dear, I don’t know’ sound, those present were also united on the general untrustworthiness of the late Trueman. ‘The fact was,’ said Fagg, ‘that patently he wasn’t a gentleman.’
‘And he was a killjoy,’ said Fishbane.
‘Puritan,’ said the Commander.
‘Well, maybe a bit too enthusiastic,’ said Glastonbury: it was the harshest thing Amiss had ever heard him say.
‘Fellow was a damn pain in the neck,’ said Chatterton, ‘and we’re all well rid of him.’
‘Let’s drink to that,’ said Fagg.
A squeak of ‘Oh, I don’t really think we…’ was drowned out by Fagg saying ‘Hooray!’ and a clink of glasses.
‘The last suicide on the club premises,’ observed Chatterton. ‘Let me think. Would that have been Buffy Strangeways?’
‘Oh dear! I remember that,’ said Glastonbury. ‘Some time in the late forties, was it?’
‘It would have been August the nineteenth, nineteen fifty-one,’ said Chatterton. ‘I remember it well. It was the last day of the fifth test between England and Australia. We won by…seven…no, eight wickets. I came back from the Oval to find that Buffy had blown his brains out because his father had refused to pay his gambling debts. Anyway, surely this Trueman business has all blown over now? Officially, I mean?’
‘Haven’t seen hair nor hide of a copper for more than a week now,’ observed the Commander cheerfully.
‘Is Con Meredith-Lee back yet?’ asked Chatterton.
<
br /> ‘Due back around now,’ said the Commander.
‘So it’ll all be news to him, will it?’
‘Suppose so,’ said Fagg. ‘He’d been gone several days before Trueman did it. Be interesting to see how he gets on without his precious protégé.’ The malice was palpable.
‘I dare say he won’t have the heart to push on with any changes,’ said Fishbane. ‘He’ll leave us in peace now.’
‘Oh, I do hope so,’ bleated Glastonbury. ‘I didn’t like the sound of changes. Everything works so well as it is. We’re not doing anyone any harm.’
‘Don’t underestimate Con,’ said the Commander. ‘When he’s got the bit between his teeth, you can’t hold him back. If you ask me, he’s got some damn notion in his head that it will be hard to rid him of.’
Silence fell. The bell rang and Amiss went in to find a pair of newcomers in search of tea and toast. Since one of them was the old gourmet Mauleverer, Amiss had to endure a lengthy disquisition on how the toast should be (very hot and dark brown), on how much butter (lots), and why the club should provide hedgerow jam (blackberry, elderberry and rosehip) and a great deal more. By the time he had dealt with all this, the quintet had dissolved: only Glastonbury and Chatterton remained. Glastonbury appeared to be warning his friend to stay well away from the boiled onions that would accompany the mutton at dinner.
‘Onions always give one indigestion, Cully.’
‘I haven’t had indigestion since that occasion in, let me see, it must have been nineteen sixty-one, when I dined with…’
Amiss left thankfully and went back to his researches in the library.
***
‘What are you doing this evening, Sunil?’
‘The usual. I have an essay on the disintegration of the British Empire. And you?’
‘I’m off to dinner with friends. Two other blokes. Just the three of us. My girlfriend’s in India. My friend Jim’s wife is in America and my other pal’s had his heart broken by a hard-hearted woman with a background like yours, who passed him up in favour of an arranged marriage.’
