Fowlers End

by Gerald Kersh

  He was a fatherly kind of fellow and gave me advice, namely: “You college boys are always up to larks. But don’t you try that one here again, that’s all I’m telling you, because there’s about nine counts we could get you on. Drink your tea, grab your bag, and take your lucky.”

  So, burning with shame but faint with relief, I took Kyra’s suitcase to Charing Cross Station, where I proposed to check it in the cloakroom.

  The clerk said, “One moment, please,” and disappeared. About half a minute later I found myself surrounded by big men in undistinguished clothes, one of whom said to me, with all possible politeness, “Excuse me, but would you happen to mind if I happened to have a little tiny look inside that case of yours—if you’re sure it wouldn’t be too much trouble to let me have the loan of the keys for just a moment?”

  “Oh,” I said, “look as much as you like. Only I haven’t got any keys.”

  “That’s funny, isn’t it?”

  Meanwhile, a crowd was gathering. I remember that a matron pointed at me, shouting, “Serve ‘im right!” Then she asked her neighbor, “What’s ‘e done?” A space was cleared by the police. One of the cloakroom clerks fainted away while the polite detective opened Kyra’s suitcase very easily with a hairpin and a penknife. Seeing that there was nothing inside it but old newspapers, dirty washing, two batteries and an alarm clock, he became annoyed. He, too, gave me a lecture, but only a mild one.

  I stopped it by asking, “And is there any law which says that a gentleman may not carry such articles in a suitcase? Are we living in the Middle Ages?”

  He said no, not exactly, but orders were orders. So I checked Kyra’s suitcase. The clerk, who had been brought to with a dose of water, banged it down on a shelf and started the bell of the alarm clock ringing again; at which he fainted again. I couldn’t blame him: they were hard times for cloakroom clerks—if it wasn’t dynamite from the I.R.A., it was dead babies or portions of unidentifiable female torsos. Once some practical joker deposited a horse’s liver in a tin trunk one summer’s day and went away never to be heard of again.

  It seems that I fell into this class because, although he said nothing more, the polite detective followed me with such a look that it seemed to go right through my back like two knitting needles.

  It would appear that I was born to be misunderstood, and to misunderstand.

  I had duties to perform, arduous and unpleasant ones, for which I never was spiritually equipped: I had money to borrow—and while I was convinced that on the Cruikback deal I could return my investors at least seven hundred per cent, I felt that I was on a begging errand. To keep up my strength, I went to a teashop and ordered poached eggs on mashed potatoes. By God knows what miracle of divided consciousness, I put my elbow into it.

  12

  JUNE WHISTLER was wearing, again, that preposterous gown; and she had been otherwise busy with needles and crochet hook. She had made five pairs of diminutive woolen boots and was working now on a cashmere layette, crooning in a clear sweet voice (but it only had one note) some kind of lullaby, of which I remember only these lines:

  Good night, brother squirrel, to bed I must go,

  I spend all my winters in sleeping, you know ...

  When I came in she cried, “Daddy!” and offered me a sedate embrace, almost at arm’s length.

  “You mustn’t be too rough with me. I can distinctly feel kicking.”

  “What, already?” I asked.

  “I’m awfully healthy, you know, and with some people the little baby develops quicker than in others. Thank God I come of good sound yeoman stock! Really, you know, it’s quite unnecessary to gestate for nine months. It runs in my family. I was born at seven months, and even then they had to get me out with steel forceps. I come of a healthy breed. Oh, darling, I was so looking forward to seeing you! What a pity we can’t make love.”

  After what I had been through that day, it would have been a great relief to go to bed with this charming girl with the manzanita hair. In fact, it seemed unreasonable not to. If she were indeed pregnant, by her own reckoning she couldn’t be more than twelve days gone.

  “At this stage,” I said hopefully, “I’m sure it couldn’t hurt.” I could not help adding, with some irony, “Or are you afraid, perhaps, that I’ll get kicked?”

  She replied gravely, “No, it isn’t that. I got The Midwife’s Handbook out of the library, and at this stage the foetus is head downwards. So the kicking is upwards. And it looks like a dog, a little dog.”

  “Do you think it might bite me then?”

  There was no stopping her, for the moment. She ran on: “The human foetus goes through all kinds of stages. Isn’t it marvelous? You’d be surprised at the stages the human foetus goes through. In our family we skip a few of them, but generally you look like a tadpole, and then a fish, and then a dog—only instead of limbs you’ve got buds, little buds—” Evidently she was thinking of roses, or something. “And at last there is a real human being with a soul. And it doesn’t hurt, really; and it needn’t be expensive. I didn’t hurt my mother a bit, only it cost thirty-five shillings for ether.... I beg your pardon, were you trying to be sarcastic just now?”

  “Tadpoles, dogs!” I muttered. “I beg your pardon, sweetheart, only I’ve had a hard morning. Honestly, June, I’m prepared to take my chance of being bitten or kicked as the case may be. Really, I’m quite a strong man. I’ve already been kicked by pretty hefty fellows. And at twelve days, even if this foetus had teeth on it like a mastiff, isn’t it so to speak imprisoned for the time being? I mean, be reasonable. It might look a bit like a dog, but it isn’t, so to speak, kept on a chain to bite people. I cannot consider you, darling, as a kennel. As for its turning out a human being, you can believe me from current experience, the odds against that are about a hundred to one. It won’t mind. Come on, June?”

  “Oh, darling, if only it was yesterday!”

  “And what was it yesterday? An amoeba, or something?”

  “I’m trying to make you understand. It was the little birdies that go tweet-tweet-tweet,” she said. “This I do not understand.”

  “Well, if you want me to put it in plain English, I was squiffy, and twittered.” And when I still failed to grasp her meaning, she said, “Wait a minute,” and got out What Every Girl Should Know, turned the pages until she found the item she wanted, which she marked for me with a delicate pink thumbnail. Feminine euphemisms never fail to amuse and astonish me; women will employ the vilest vulgarisms and the most sickeningly allusive argot rather than the clean scientific term. June Whistler was simply menstruating.

  There are certain situations in which all you can do is slap yourself violently on the forehead. This was one of them. I swallowed several times and then said, “Look here, June. After a delay of four days you start naming your future son—”

  “Five days.”

  “Then you start knitting dozens of pairs of little woolen boots—”

  “Only five pairs,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

  “On top of that you menstruate—” “Don’t use such language in my house! I had the red flag out.”

  “Excuse me, I will not use any such sickening roundabout talk. Then you start making cashmere layettes. For God’s sake!”

  She said, “It’s in The Nurse’s Vade Mecum: often a girl can squiff up to the eighth month. And I think you’re being absolutely beastly!” Her anger being aroused, she tore up the Sunday Express; relented, wept, wiped her eyes on one of the little white boots, and said, “Comfort me, Daniel—I did so want my little Belisarius.”

  I couldn’t help it: this was the crowning absurdity of the day. “Little Belisarius!” I cried, and burst into helpless laughter. “Little Belisarius!”

  She hurled the nurse’s Vade Mecum at me, missed, but followed it up with an eccles cake, which, by good fortune, hit me on the chin. I say good fortune because, at the sight of this little round cake sticking to my face, her anger vanished and this best-hearted of women
began to laugh. Then she contemplated the baby boots and the partly finished layette and said, “I can unravel them and make you a sweater.”

  “It would be better,” I said, “to give them to Dr. Barnardo’s Home.”

  This idea brightened her up considerably. “I’ll finish the layette,” she said, “only I’ll stipulate, definitely, that the child they go to must be called Belisarius.”

  I said, “For God’s sake, sweetheart, don’t do it! They’ll make his life a misery. Say you had a baby of that name. Would you address him as Belisarius? Certainly not. You’d call him Belly. That name would stick to him throughout his life. In any case, gifts of this kind ought to be unconditional.” Mirth overtook me again, half hysterical. “Twittering!” I exclaimed, and she couldn’t help laughing with me; she was relieved, too, only she didn’t want to admit it.

  Very tenderly she peeled the eccles cake off my face, scraped its filling off my cheek with a fruit knife, put it back where it belonged, and served it to me with a cup of tea. Then, as if struck with an inspiration, she said, “But perhaps you’re hungry?” and produced a small paper packet. Her eyes filled with tears as she assured me, “Really, they’re awfully nutritious. Honestly, they absorb twenty times their bulk, and it doesn’t take five minutes. Couldn’t I make you a Greenburger—just a little one? Let me lick that eccles cake off your face and fry you a lovely Greenburger?”

  I said, “No Greenburgers,” and, taking the envelope out of her hand, opened the window, and threw the envelope into the street.

  “But this is preposterous!” June Whistler said, in her great-lady manner.

  “I dare say,” I said, adding, “Twitterer!”

  After a spell of helpless laughter she became grave—somewhat in the manner of a little girl who is arranging a cardboard-box funeral for a dead mouse—and said, “This is no laughing matter, you know.”

  Hardened, perhaps, by Fowlers End, I said, “To me this is a great laughing matter. Sit down, June, and let me talk to you.”

  She plucked disconsolately at the maternity garment which she expected, somehow, to fit tight in no time at all, brightened, and said briskly, “Of course, you know, I’m awfully frugal. I allowed for taking in. Really, I could turn this into a summer frock under your eyes.... Dan Laverock, I won’t be laughed at!”

  “Shut up and sit down,” I said, with a peculiar lisp because the eccles cake I had tried to swallow was still clinging to the roof of my mouth.

  “I love it when you talk to me like that. Call me a bitch. Oh, please call me a bitch!”

  “I’ll see you in hell first!” I cried. “You are nothing of the sort.”

  “Would you like to bite me?”

  “Certainly not,” I said, with indignation.

  “Not even pinch my breasts?”

  “You know perfectly well that I don’t go in for such things,” I said, “only I want to do something worse to you.”

  She cried, “Oh, do it, do it! But not where I’m twittering.... Will you mark me all over with your talons?”

  “I will do nothing of the sort. I was simply trying to say that I wanted to borrow some money off you.”

  June Whistler said wistfully, “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to thrash me within an inch of my life?” “Definitely.”

  She became pensive then but said in a little voice, “Then will you let me give you my all?”

  I said, “Your all, no. Certainly not. On no account your all.”

  “Why are you so cruel to me?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t be such a bleeding idiot!” I shouted.

  “There is no need,” said she, with sudden dignity, “I say there is no need to throw a lady’s condition into her face. Take my all!”

  “Well, what’s your all?”

  “Seven hundred and eighty-four pounds, eighteen shillings, and fourpence.”

  “Well,” I said, “let me have two hundred and fifty, and I think I can guarantee you five hundred.”

  “I’d rather you took my all, so long as I get it back.”

  “This is an investment,” I said.

  “It would have been so much easier to discuss it yesterday,” said she, discontented. “You can hit me if you like, where it doesn’t show. Oh, well,” she added, upon an enlivening afterthought, “perhaps this is some new, subtle way to hurt me. Have another eccles cake?”

  Ignoring this last question, I said, “Do you want to invest two hundred and fifty pounds or do you not?”

  “Yes,” she said, and went for her checkbook.

  “Without guaranteeing the time, I promise you that you’ll have five hundred back for it.”

  Tucking the check into my breast pocket, June Whistler whispered, “I’m sorry there won’t be any little Belisarius. I’m oogly-googly-guggly-wug. I mean—” her eyes refilled with tears—“it’s not my fault. Don’t blame me if I have the snorts. Really, it’s in the Bible, somewhere. But you shall have your little Belisarius, believe me. Only, you know, you’ve got to plant your seed within me, or somewhere.... Are you sure that check’s enough? Won’t you at least take half of my all? ... Oh, how unkind nature can be! Couldn’t I persuade you, for example, to burn me with a lighted cigarette and pretend to strangle me with a silk stocking? I think I’ve got a cigarette somewhere, and I’m sure I have stockings ...”

  “Perhaps some other time,” I said. “Meanwhile—” I tapped the check—“you’ll get this back, and with a vengeance.”

  “I hate to twitter, but it’s in the Book of Deuteronomy. Or some Book. I shall wiggle like the devil until I’ve stopped blooping. Lover, come back to me—oh, damn this squiff!”

  So we parted. I felt, somehow, that in taking leave of June Whistler I was taking leave of our senses.

  In the street I saw a policeman and four or five Sunday loiterers staring intently at a puddle, so I could not help taking a look over the policeman’s shoulder. Something appeared to be festering on the tarmac. As I looked, it grew. It was fascinating to observe how this object was absorbing the puddle. It looked like an unearthly kind of green fungoid porridge. Aman touched it with the ferrule of his umbrella, at which it collapsed—only to rise again, while little puffs of escaping vapor made craters in its repulsive surface. The policeman said, “I have been on the force thirty-two years, but I admit that this has got me baffled—” he wrote in his notebook—“this might be important.”

  An excitable little fellow in a blue shirt and a black hat, probably a minor poet—they often live near the zoo— said, “It’s got a smell of decay, but it’s growing!”

  Observing that the entire packet of June’s Greenburger had fallen into a comparatively small body of water, I went away quietly but quickly; because if it was going to go on at this rate, I felt, it might block the street.

  Then I went to see my mother. Perhaps she was getting old and tired: she had stopped being particular in her premonitions and was foretelling everything. She said, “Something seemed to tell me you were coming.” Ignoring my protest that I had promised a week before to visit her this Sunday afternoon, she went on, “So I got in extra crumpets and made you a surprise.”

  “Not meringues?” I asked.

  “Eccles cake. You always did adore eccles cake.”

  Heavily, no doubt, I said, “I did. True, I did.” Then I said, “Listen. Do you remember telling me you had a few hundred pounds? Three hundred, I think you said?”

  “Actually,” she said, “it’s more like five or six. I had a feeling—”

  “If you lend me some of it, I’ll give it back double.”

  “Oh, my darling Daniel, I’ve been saving it for you, and I don’t want it back double or single, truly I don’t. Only I want you to promise me one thing: Not a word to your Uncle Hugh!”

  “I promise,” I said, and, to please her, took another eccles cake, while she went to an old Sheraton cabinet that my father used to love and took out an antique tea caddy, carefully locked, but with the key still in it. From this she d
ragged a roll of bank notes big enough to choke a horse, saying, “Take it, Daniel, my dear boy, take it.”

  “Why are you carrying so much loose cash in the house?”

  “In case of burglars,” she said.

  “Couldn’t you put it in the bank?”

  “I can’t, in case of your Uncle Hugh. Oh, do please take it away. Only nobody must know. Not a word to your Uncle Hugh.”

  I said, “He’s not such a bad sort. But I promise you I’ll pay you back with a hundred per cent interest.”

  “If you do, I’ll give it straight back to you,” my mother said, “but first of all I’ll show it to your Uncle Hugh—”

  “Oh, damn my Uncle Hugh!”

  “Invest it wisely, is all I ask,” said she, beginning to cry. “Have another eccles cake—just a little teeny one?”

  “I have a long journey ahead of me. Could I take it with me to eat on the way?”

  She packed me twelve, and so I went away with a total of six hundred and fifty pounds, eighteen shillings, and sixpence in my pocket over and above what I’d had to start with. The odd sixpence, my mother’s, was a Canadian one with a hole in it; I put it in my pocket for luck, and there it rests to this day. Did it bring me luck? I don’t know. It is true that I am still alive to tell the tale, but is this luck? I cannot answer this question.

  Before going back to Fowlers End, which I had come to regard as home, I went to a coffee shop and had what was ambiguously called a “pie,” with boiled potatoes. These nourishing tubers had all the qualities of unscented soap, except that they did not lather. God knows what was in that pie: if you offered it to me now I would hurl it right in your face—but then I enjoyed it.

  To my astonishment, when I got back to Fowlers End, Sam Yudenow was there, in a state of rage bordering on the frenetic. Only he had it under control for the time being and was standing like Napoleon on the Bellerophon (but he was smoking a cigar and wearing a homburg hat) uttering almost Napoleonic phrases. I have read, somewhere, that Napoleon Bonaparte had a shrill voice. So, today, had Sam Yudenow. But instead of brandishing his fists in my face and calling me Coglione, Sam Yudenow said, “The little I ask of life, the minute I turn my back! The Gveek has abdicated. Put that in your pipe and stick it up your arse!”