by Ruth Edwards
‘Bloody women,’ said Sunil, producing a passable imitation of the Commander. ‘Don’t know their place any more, like everyone else. Don’t know what civilisation is coming to.’
Amiss finished changing into his outdoor clothes. ‘Maybe the Commander could give you a few tips for your essay,’ he said.
‘No need,’ said Sunil. ‘Ffeatherstonehaugh’s gives me quite enough inspiration as it is. The miracle is that Britain held on to the bloody Empire for so long. D’you think the Raj was like this?’
‘Without the sex. We always left that to the natives.’ Amiss gestured at Ganesh’s attendant ladies.
‘Depends on what kind of sex you’ve got in mind,’ said Sunil. He sat on the edge of his bed tucking into the remains of a Pooley-provided Stilton that Amiss had insisted he finish. ‘The lovers were in today.’
‘Who?’
‘Glastonbury and Chatterton. Didn’t you know about them?’
‘Know what?’
‘Oh, Gooseneck told me about them. They used to be lovers. The club was liberal about that sort of thing in the old days apparently. It was well known. Of course all passion is spent now.’
‘Just as well,’ said Amiss. ‘I can’t imagine how they’d manage with the zimmer, although there’s probably a whole magazine in the library devoted to obscene things you can do with disability aids.’ He picked up his raincoat. ‘Goodnight, Sunil. See you later.’
‘Goodnight, Robert. Enjoy yourself.’
Amiss looked back before he closed the door. The sight of the rather forlorn youth sitting on the uncomfortable bed at the top of a vast, almost empty building touched his heart. He wished he could have invited him to dinner that night.
‘Will you come out some evening, Sunil?’ he asked. ‘We could go to the theatre or out to a restaurant or something.’
‘When term is over, Robert, I’d be delighted. But you mustn’t feel sorry for me. Now go off and enjoy yourself.’
‘Work well.’
A few minutes after Amiss had gone Sunil cleared up the fragments of cheese and biscuits, deposited them neatly in the waste-paper basket, picked up a couple of books and some blank paper and descended to the next storey. He turned right and went half-way along the corridor and knocked at the fourth door.
‘Come in,’ called Gooseneck.
Sunil closed the door behind him and Gooseneck took his books and papers from him. They embraced and Sunil began to sob.
‘My dear boy,’ said Gooseneck. ‘My dear, dear boy.’
Chapter Eleven
Amiss was melancholy. ‘It’s enough to make you want to top yourself when you get to seventy.’
‘You just might be over-reacting, Robert,’ said Milton. ‘I wouldn’t have thought your employers are exactly typical of our senior citizens.’
‘Well, damn it, they’re more privileged than most of them,’ said Amiss. ‘You’d think it would make them more sane and agreeable than the norm. At least they’re not spending half their lives standing in queues.’
‘Adversity never hurt anyone,’ said Pooley. ‘It’s strengthening, if anything.’
‘What a load of pompous twaddle,’ said Amiss. ‘There’s a post office around the corner from where I live, and every Thursday morning the pensioners start queuing outside from about half-past eight, whatever the weather. They stand there and moan about being cold or wet, about their ailments, about the inadequacies of the National Health Service, about rising crime levels.’
‘How d’you know all this?’ interrupted Milton.
‘Because it’s what they always talk about when they’re in queues. I’ve got caught in the post office once or twice on pension day when I was buying more stamps for my fruitless job applications.’
‘And why do they start queuing half an hour before the post office opens?’ asked Pooley.
‘Christ, don’t ask me. Presumably they’re afraid it will run out of money before it’s their turn. A touch pessimistic, our senior citizens, I find.’
Milton laughed. ‘I think you’re being just a touch bleak, Robert. More coffee and perhaps a spot of brandy? And let’s move into the sitting-room.’
‘I’m very pleased to have this competition going between you and Ellis,’ remarked Amiss when they were settled in comfortable chairs. ‘This meal was quite as good as the one provided by his noble cousin last week. I presume you didn’t do it yourself?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Milton. ‘As you know, I’m an adequate, plain cook, but I’ve neither the time nor the talent to produce a coq au vin like this one: it was produced by my neighbour, Mrs. Neville, who is seventy-five years old and runs a thriving emergency cooking, house-sitting and general crisis-management service for the neighbourhood.’
‘That’s just too neat,’ said Amiss. ‘You’re having me on, Jim.’
‘I am not,’ said Milton. ‘You appear to be familiar with two groups of the old: the wingeing paranoid dimwits who can think of nothing better to do than queue unnecessarily, and the depraved and corrupt denizens of ffeatherstonehaugh’s. Well, I happen to know quite a lot of clever, amusing, wise, energetic old people who are excellent company and among whom are several of my friends. So there.’
‘I’m on Jim’s side,’ said Pooley. ‘Where I come from is chock-a-block with perfectly useful and agreeable people who happen to be old.’
Amiss arranged himself more comfortably in his armchair and dangled his leg over the arm. ‘So how do we avoid turning into those sort of pillocks I’ve been talking about, Jim?’
‘It’s self-evident. By and large, old people are what they were when they were young, only more so.’
‘Right, so Fagg is just more xenophobic and choleric than he would have been in his prime.’
‘Well, he’s a classic. He wouldn’t have got away with talking to servants that way in his mess or wherever it was he spent his working life. And he’d have had to hold back on some of the madder racist stuff in public. Now he can get away with anything.’
‘Of course, Gooseneck did tell me that Fagg suffers from gout and haemorrhoids, which make him behave even more horribly than when symptom-free.’
Pooley was looking thoughtful. ‘Wasn’t there a judge in the 1950s who had a similar problem? The criminal fraternity knew that if he was shifting uncomfortably in his seat when sentencing time came, they were likely to get a ferocious sentence.’
‘In any case,’ said Milton, ‘the point is that Fagg was obviously never a nice person. He’s just got nastier.’
‘Glastonbury’s nice, but he just has no sort of grip on what’s going on.’
‘That’s pretty straightforward senility. He’s just gone to pieces rather early.’
‘And from what you say,’ said Pooley, consulting the copious notes he had taken throughout their dinner, ‘apart from a tendency to sleep most of his life away, his only major problem is that he’s a worrier.’
‘Yes, I suppose he’s OK,’ said Amiss. ‘There could be worse role models for old age than Glastonbury. His is not a bad life: I could take to it myself.’
‘As long as it didn’t include sleeping with Chatterton,’ proffered Milton.
‘A sine qua non for a happy old age,’ said Amiss.
‘Fishbane’s an interesting case,’ said Pooley. ‘It must be embarrassing to be like that.’
‘I detect no embarrassment in that libidinous old bastard,’ said Amiss. ‘I think what happened to Fishbane was that years ago people told him he was a bit of a dog and he therefore confuses licentiousness with lustiness.’
‘What does he do with himself when he’s not pinching waitresses?’ asked Milton.
‘Well, of course, there are his heavy duties as librarian—checking through all those magazines to make sure they’re intact takes a fair bit of time. Otherwise, he goes out quite a lot and he occasionally, according to Gooseneck, entertains ladies in his bedroom.’
‘I’d formed the impression,’ said Pooley, ‘that they all had spartan bedrooms.�
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‘Well, not our Fishbane. It’s only the monastic types who like their bedrooms uncomfortable. Fishbane has something on a grander scale altogether. He sent me there the other day to pick up his reading glasses. No, sorry, not quite reading glasses in the normal sense—pince-nez. I think the reason he dresses as an Edwardian is because he wants to see himself as a dashing young stage door Johnny.’
‘So what was the room like?’ Milton was fascinated.
‘Huge. Vulgar 1930s. Quite a large collection of rather amusing French prints by Toulouse-Lautrec and some more obscure colleagues. You know the kind of thing. Ladies of the night dancing on tables among the champagne bottles while watched lecherously by older, affluent-looking chaps. The room is naturally big on mirrors, with a large sofa for dalliance and, of course, a four-poster bed. Oh, and, of course, red velvet curtains and brothel wallpaper.’
‘And he’s allowed to entertain?’
‘The committee make the rules. You know that. And they seem to work on the principle of allowing each other to do anything they like. Fishbane’s bedroom is somewhat out of the way and near the lift, so that the ladies can be discreetly smuggled up there by Ramsbum. So whatever noises he and his friends make don’t disturb his colleagues, and the ferocious snoring of the Commander doesn’t penetrate the love-nest.’
‘Well, full marks for single-mindedness,’ said Milton. ‘Short of having an operation, I think he’s dealt with his condition reasonably well.’
‘Unlike the Commander.’ Pooley was sounding condemnatory. ‘It’s a sad thing to see someone who had an important job in the navy becoming such an irresponsible old soak.’
‘Sometimes you really are incredibly stuffy, Ellis,’ said Amiss. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t say Her Majesty’s navy. As far as I understand it, commanders were ten a penny and the whole cultural ethos of the navy was based on drink.’
‘You’re surely not defending him.’ Pooley looked shocked.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Ellis. Of course I’m not. He’s obviously neglected his job and let the club go to pot and is generally a frightful old bugger and an excrescence. It’s just that sometimes you sound like someone straight out of a Second World War movie and it gets on my lower-middle-class nerves.’
‘Lower-middle-class, my ass,’ said Pooley.
Amiss looked surprised.
‘You’re an Oxford graduate and a high flier. Well, a retired high flier in the Civil Service. Don’t give me that crap about being lower-middle-class: it really annoys me.’
‘Now chaps, now chaps,’ said Milton hastily. ‘Let’s drop the class warfare and get back to business. I know what you’re going to be like when you’re old, Robert.’
‘Provoking, I suppose,’ said Amiss.
‘Too damn right,’ said Pooley, grinning. ‘You’ll sit in the corner in your club making barbed comments to all who come within your ken.’
‘They’ll all avoid you,’ said Milton. ‘They’ll be terrified of hearing you say something about them that they can’t bear.’
‘You’ll be a pariah,’ said Pooley.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Amiss, ‘I think I might become a popular pet of the young. I’ll tell them malicious gossip about the rest of the club and I’ll become a kind of mascot. “Old Amiss, tongue like an asp, but not a bad fellow really and generous with the whisky.”’
Pooley was looking again at his notes. ‘We haven’t talked about Chatterton.’
‘Well, what more is there to say?’ asked Amiss. ‘He’s pretty lively as they go. A fellow whose hip operation and general physical incapacity doesn’t stop him going off to gaming-houses gets my vote, even if he does have a tendency to gurn on endlessly about obscure dates in the past of no interest to anyone.’
‘Comes of having a mathematical mind I expect,’ observed Milton.
‘If you ask me, it comes of hanging around too long with Glastonbury, who regards his every word as wise or witty. I’ve never seen anyone so besotted.’
‘So which of them is the murderer?’ asked Pooley.
‘I think you are slightly jumping to conclusions, Ellis,’ observed Milton. ‘The Admiral wasn’t able to adduce anything new in evidence when he made that allegation. He was basing it only on a recent knowledge of Trueman and the belief that his committee colleagues are capable of doing whatever it takes to preserve their ill-gotten privileges.’
‘Anyway, why should they think that getting rid of Trueman was going to solve anything?’ asked Amiss. ‘The Admiral’s still in charge.’
‘Well,’ said Milton, ‘I have to admit that if you’re very old, short-term solutions must carry more weight than they would for the middle-aged. It might be just a matter of buying time and hoping the Admiral dropped dead of a stroke or something.’
‘Maybe they’ll kill him too,’ said Pooley, ‘once he mounts his grand plan.’
‘That’s going to take time,’ said Milton. ‘He said he was going softly and that he was much hampered by having Trueman replaced by the Commander.’
‘Anyway,’ said Amiss, ‘from what you say, it’s not as if he could bring in the police and have the club cleansed of sin. Didn’t he say they weren’t technically fraudulent.’
‘Oh, exactly. That’s it,’ said Pooley. ‘That’s the brilliance of it all. Some of these guys had brains once, even if not that much sign remains. Lord ffeatherstonehaugh left the money in trust for the good of the club, but it is absolutely up to the committee to determine priorities. If Chatterton chooses to flog, with the agreement of the committee, priceless port from the cellar, so long as the money is laundered through the entertainment account it allows him to be subsidised for a jaunt to Monte Carlo and no doubt Fishbane for nights of bliss with ladies from a call-girl agency.’
‘But why have disaffected members never revolted?’ asked Amiss.
‘Because the town members get an excellent deal and the residents get paradise. The only people who really know how rotten the whole set-up is are servants or residents, and servants are powerless and residents are enthusiastically in favour of the status quo. It takes a crusading type like the Admiral to find out what’s going on and retain the desire to do something about it.’ Milton got up and refilled their coffee cups and brandy glasses.
‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ asked Amiss. ‘Does the interview with the Admiral make any difference to anything?’
‘It strengthens my case,’ said Pooley.
‘Hold on, Ellis,’ said Milton. ‘It doesn’t on paper. There is no new evidence that entitles us to start pulling ffeatherstonehaugh’s apart. I had hoped that the allegations of fraud might make our path easier on this one, but the Admiral himself admits that there really is no legal transgression that he can yet point to. I’ve got to have some new official piece of evidence before I can go in and start interrogating those old sods. The only good news I can tell you is that I would very much like to have the opportunity. I’m much less agnostic than I was, Ellis, when you first started to make an issue of this. Between you, the Admiral and Robert, I have become convinced that the timing of Trueman’s death was a mite convenient.’
‘I expect things will get stirred up pretty soon now that the Admiral’s back in town,’ observed Amiss. ‘I hope you’ve warned him that he’s the obvious next target.’
‘He knows that perfectly well,’ said Milton. ‘The one thing that worries me is that I don’t think he cares. He’s got his teeth into this, he’s angry and he doesn’t seem to have a lot to live for really. If you ask me, he’s one of those chaps whose marriage was so close and idyllic that he’ll never get over his wife’s death: he’s just passing the time as usefully as he can. Except when he had to go to sea, they were never apart during their whole thirty-five years together. She went everywhere with him unless forbidden by regulations and never went away on her own.’
‘How unlike the modern woman,’ said Amiss. ‘Take our advice, Ellis. When you decide to get married, fix yourself up with someone of
the old school, not one of those feminist flibbertigibbets of the kind Jim and I have landed ourselves with—undomesticated, never there, eyes set on further career mountains to be climbed. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.’
‘Quite right, Commander,’ said Milton. He topped up Amiss’s drink.
***
The doorbell rang at midnight.
‘Ah!’ said Pooley. ‘That’ll be my taxi. I ordered it in advance to stop Robert trying to persuade me to stay on.’
‘You doubt your own will-power?’ asked Amiss.
‘I remember the hangover I had the last time I went on the tiles with you, and tomorrow I have to play squash at nine. D’you want me to give you a lift back to the club?’
‘Drop me at home instead,’ said Amiss. ‘I’ve been rather avoiding the flat except to call in once or twice to pick up mail, but I’d a letter this morning from Rachel. I must say, the diplomatic bag works extremely fast in both directions, so we are managing to keep up some kind of dialogue: she was insistent that I get out of ffeatherstonehaugh’s as much as possible. I suppose she’s afraid I’ll get as dotty as everybody there. So I thought I’d spend tomorrow at home clearing up and reading the newspapers and engaging in some spiritually uplifting reading. What d’you suggest? The Vanity of Human Wishes? A bit of Milton? Pope?’
‘I told the chap two minutes,’ said Pooley, returning from the front door. ‘Maybe you could go to church.’
‘I only ever go to church when I have to go to funerals,’ said Amiss gloomily. ‘Latterly that takes me there quite often enough for a member of the Church of England, let alone an atheist. I suppose you have a family pew in your local?’
‘Well, when I’m at home one has to show the flag.’ Pooley had adopted the embarrassed tone he reserved for all conversations about the family estate.
‘I have an alternative suggestion,’ said Milton. ‘I’ve nothing to do until Monday, so why don’t you stay over, Robert? We can stay up late and drink too much, not play squash in the morning, go to the pub at lunch-time via the newspaper shop, and stuff ourselves with roast beef and beer. Then if the weather’s OK we can have a walk in the afternoon and reminisce about the days when women stayed at home and looked after their menfolk.’
