by Mavis Cheek
'Guess what?' says Derek, forking in whole lumps of fish and swallowing almost without chewing. 'I've ordered the suite for the bathroom and you should just see the taps.'
'Chew, Derek,' she says.
He begins to describe them. He smiles as he does so. Out come those teeth again with little bits of fish attached to them.
'When you have finished what is in your mouth, Derek,' she says.
He gulps and begins describing them again. Brunei, when first he beheld the joys of ironwork, could not have been more enthusiastic.
The Little Blonde Secretary Bird feels better. She likes Derek to be occupied. Nobody else will have anything like those taps since they are newly over from France. When, one day, their home is complete and they begin to entertain, people will be very, very impressed. It's a shame they haven't had much opportunity to see their friends since they moved here, but what with one thing and another there just hasn't been time . . .
'Lovely,' she says, and adds some water to the teapot. On the kitchen table is a note she had made to herself. It says, 'Eyebrows!' and is underlined several times.
Derek pushes his plate away and begins reading the catalogue for extractors. He will watch Coronation Street first (she likes him to digest his food properly) and then begin measuring up.
*
Square Jaw is humming to himself as he makes his way out of the Rawalpindi and back to the car. He has bought lamb pasanda, chicken mughlai, Bangalore okra, special dhal, stuffed paratha and plain nan (remembering that Melanie prefers these to rice). With a selection of relishes, and mango ice-cream. His heart is once again light. He is doing the right thing. He is courting her as she asked. Is he not?
Melanie is also humming. She has decided to push the boat out after all and makes fish kebabs, steak au poivre, and pavlova. The magazine menu also suggested mango ice-cream, but it is not a fruit she cares for. Besides, there is quite enough to eat and, she simpers into the fish marinade, they don't want to be sitting up eating all night now, do they? He will understand from all this what she means by tokens of love. She smiles and hums again. Won't he?
*
Red Gold has persuaded Mrs Lovitt to cover for her in the afternoon. 'I have something to deliver to Lambeth Palace,' she says, 'and I need to wait for a reply.'
If you are going to lie successfully, she remembers him saying before a television interview, then lie outrageously.
Mrs Lovitt is impressed. Lambeth Palace!
'I wish I could say more,' whispers Red Gold, 'but I am sworn to secrecy.'
Mrs Lovitt's eyes bulge. She practically genuflects. And only from Cockermouth. Truly the Church is taking a serious approach to the North-South divide. Mrs Lovitt is from Guildford and has had nothing to do directly with Lambeth Palace ever.
Red Gold slips away. She intends to call into a department store first and use their make-up.
Her heart beats painfully.
Her hands tremble.
Love.
She could almost faint with the prospect of the wicked act before her.
No, Arthur, she says, when his sad face invades her excitement, I have been a good wife and have atoned for not loving. This is my reward. Just one look, one meeting perhaps (her desire for this is too powerful not to hope), and then, no more. Just this one thing. To see him again, to talk to him. What harm can it do? Just this once?
*
When the ambulancemen came to collect the body, they found there were two. One very dead, one alive and groaning. The corridor was warm and airless. Mr Jones stood to one side to let them pass. They sniffed.
'Been here some time by the smell of it,' said one.
The other put a clean white handkerchief to his nose and nodded.
Mr Jones picked up his tool-box, stepped over the body and stood close to them. He was interested in what they had to say.
'Must have been here for days. Phew!' They spoke in unison and with some relish.
'On the contrary,' said Mr Jones with dignity, feeling in some way this was an aspersion on his efficiency as caretaker. 'It has only just occurred.' He stepped closer. They recoiled anew.
'Christ,' said the one with the handkerchief. 'It's him.'
Warm air, closed-in corridors, body heat and pickling vinegar create an odour not unlike the rotting of corpses or unwashed feet. Mr Jones was asked to leave the area and he did so thankfully. His onions called. From the slowly cooling body of Sylvia Perth came the fragrance of Arpege and Ottoman roses. Breathing free again, the ambulancemen advanced on the injured policeman and made as if to tend to him. Good manual training made sure that the living were always dealt with first. Sergeant Pitter whimpered as they made to move him, and suggested they should deal with the corpse first. He wanted time to build up to the idea of going anywhere; at that precise moment the corridor floor and his position upon it seemed the best and only place to be, and he was rather afraid of bursting into tears or something disgraceful if this comforting space were taken from him.
They carried Sylvia Perth with her mingled scent of Arpege, roses and death juice very gently down the stairs and settled her comfortably in the ambulance. Then they went back for the injured policeman. Without enthusiasm he heard them returning slowly up the stairs. He had just found a position in which the pain, though acute, was bearable, providing he bit the end of his tie and thought of Mrs Pitter's marmalade pudding. The mind plays useful tricks when the body is under siege. The two ambulancemen came on resolutely and stood over him. He relinquished the pudding, though not the tie, and looked at them.
They returned the look and both had the simultaneous thought that they had seen this officer before. But where? The one scratched his head, the other looked inquiringly. The policeman stared from one to the other with pleading eyes.
'I know you'll do your duty by me,' he said, and also wondered where he had seen them before.
It was the phrase 'do your duty' that gave it away. Light dawned for the two ambulancemen. The last time Sergeant Pitter had uttered that phrase in their presence it had been under very different circumstances and in a very different tone of voice. Then it had been said with intimidating sarcasm shortly before PC Pitter, the energetic police recruit eager for promotion, had stove in their placards and upturned their emergency-fund stall, FAIR PAY FOR AMBULANCEMEN their placards had said before being ground into the pavement by an exceptionally well-polished boot. Twelve weeks of no pay, the vilification of politicians and the tag of killers by default in the tabloid press left a deep impression. The dispute may have been years ago but the memory was fresh for ever in their minds.
They nudged each other to affirm recognition and narrowed their eyes.
'It is him?' said the one. 'It is,' said the other. 'Right?' said the one. 'Right,' said the other.
They rubbed their hands and spat on them. Sergeant Pitter did not altogether like that gesture. He had seen it once or twice preceding a particularly gruesome wrestling match. With some embarrassment he found himself saying, 'Be gentle with me.' They spat, rubbed, advanced again and bent towards him.
The screams were pitiful. Janice, despite being on the fifth floor and putting a cushion over her head, could still hear them as they issued from the depths of the ambulance itself. Only Sylvia Perth remained unmoved. Mr Jones turned his hearing-aid off. What with the screams and the chatter of the gawping crowd that had collected about the ambulance, his brain felt quite spongy. The gawping crowd thought that at the very least the policeman had sustained serious injury in the course of his duty, and lost all sympathy when the ambulancemen told them he had pulled a back muscle. If that was the kind of cowardly reaction a sergeant of the Force gave for something so trivial it was no wonder danger walked the streets.
'Blimey, mate,' said a generously proportioned woman of late years, 'try having a baby .. .'
Another woman tittered.
A third guffawed.
The law was seen to be weakened.
'Help!' cried the sufferer from t
he depths of the ambulance. Its driver revved and made for a pothole in the road. Sylvia Perth, untroubled, bounced. 'Help!' cried Sergeant Pitter. But none came.
After traction treatment and a short spell at home under Mrs Pitter's feet (during the course of which she withdrew both marmalade pudding and conjugal rights), Sergeant Pitter was never — quite - the energetic young officer of his fancy again.
When the ambulance drove off, Janice, who had retrieved her head from beneath the cushion and was peeking out from her balcony, felt a profound sense of relief. She also felt, with a mixture of hope and certainty, that she had been permanently reprieved from that chilling rap at the door. Now all she could do was wait. And hope. She looked at her postcard of Christine de Pisan depicted as she knelt before her queen and patroness to present her book.
How smilingly the wimpled queen accepted tribute. How delightedly her entourage of ladies looked on. The young widow had supported three children and a mother by her pen. Janice felt she was being just the teeniest bit weak by hiding herself away. And for one wild, glorious moment Janice wondered whether she could do something similar with Queen Elizabeth II? But she decided against it. It didn't seem very likely that they would find
a little workroom for her in Buckingham Palace. Best wait here, then. She picked up her Froissart. Something was bound to turn up.
Chapter Seven
R
OHANNE Bulbecker was lying under a man when the telephone call came. 'Excuse me’ she said, reaching out her arm and picking up the receiver. 'Roll off. I need to breathe.'
Outside the window, far off below, came the sound of Broadway traffic. The cultivated attending the Carnegie Hall or attempting to. The man listened and felt he was really beginning to get to know Rohanne. He concentrated on recalling the hoarding that had recently been erected near his apartment of a big-breasted woman with parted wet lips advertising toothpaste. He had to do something to maintain nether activity.
Rohanne was certainly exciting. Even if she did do things like throw him over for a telephone call at a time like this. And she was looking more and more excited as she gripped the phone. 'Do you really think there's a chance? Oh God!’ she writhed pleasurably. The man watched a little nervously. 'That would be so wonderful . . .' She held the telephone away from her and apostrophized towards the ceiling. 'So excruciatingly wonderful!'
Herbie cleared his throat. He wasn't sure if she had finished on the phone or not. And, anyway, there were limits. What was going on, anyway? Fortunately there was something erotic about it all. Even the telephone . . . 'Rohanne’ he said firmly, 'are we going to continue, or what?'
'I want it, I want it. Oh God, how I want it!' shrieked Rohanne Bulbecker, undulating into the rumpled sheets, still clutching the telephone.
It was hardly Herbie's fault that he misinterpreted this. Rohanne could be unpredictable (red wine with fish, dislike of Lloyd Webber musicals), so it was not at all unlikely that she might wish to continue their coupling while still on the telephone. Women had a right to their fantasies just as he did. With renewed vigour he leapt back into position and enjoined himself anew like a dowel into yielding wood.
At the other end of the telephone in a quiet room in Bloomsbury, Rohanne Bulbecker's London connection reeled and put down the telephone. He was a fastidious, celibate man and given to obedience. When someone shrieked, 'Get off, damn you,' twice down the telephone to him, there was little he could do but oblige. He shook his neat, unremarkable head and wondered at folly. So far as he knew, his information about Sylvia Perth's death and the freeing of Janice Gentle should have made Ms Bulbecker very happy. He had been retained by her when she was in London and instructed to keep his ear to the ground (he winced at the paucity of such language), his eyes open and his mind on the job (wince, wince), for which he would be well paid. Now here he was reporting to her exactly what she wanted to hear and she had reacted like that. Even more grateful that he had no emotional involvement with either unpredictable women or difficult men, he let himself out of his service apartment and walked down the road for a curry in solitude.
He decided as he nibbled his onion bhaji that he would, after all, become a monk. A quiet order somewhere in Malvern would suit him very well. With sudden certainty he knew that he could never, under any circumstances, be associated with the book business any more. If you were going to have popular fiction - he plucked at the crispy batter - then Janice Gentle was not bad. Indeed, given what you quite often found nowadays, she was remarkably good. He rather admired the way she managed to get to the heart of things. You could detect some real emotion despite the somewhat hackneyed settings she chose. And her characters were soothingly human . . . And - fair play - like Henry Miller, she could write; she had a natural rhythm, a delicacy, a sense of the poetical tucked within her somewhere. He was not at all surprised that Pfeiffer wanted her. She had class. He sighed. All that would probably go now. Janice Gentle would get sexy, no doubt of it with Rohanne Bulbecker in pursuit. And he had - still bound into the modern measure of the earth - accepted the silver. He held the bhaji aloft and pulled a face of painful regret. Judas money. Janice Gentle wrote with a sweet, direct line all the way back to the first flowering of literature. Chaucer, Pisan, Langland, Boccaccio. From now on all that would go.
Suddenly he was very glad Rohanne Bulbecker had shouted down the telephone. Suddenly he saw the way. Suddenly, though he might in reality be sitting in a London high street, he found himself on a metaphorical Road to Damascus. A phrase heard at a publisher's drinks party recently had offended his delicacy so much that he had, until this moment, refused to remember it. Now he did, and it made him shudder. Commodity publishing. Books as packaged, marketed products. About as inspiring as vacuum-packed ham, and with just as much water added. The clean and sterilized robe covering old whore's petticoats. The old whore being bread and circuses, for who but a fool nowadays would give hoi polloi the chance to read what might inspire them to set high their sights? The pen had lost its universal bite and had become no more than the Soma of Brave New World. He looked across at the waiter, patiently sitting while he finished his starter. He was reading a newspaper, small, easily handled, quickly digested (rather like chips), none of its paragraphs longer than four lines ...
Well. He would have no more of it. If Ms Rohanne Bulbecker changed her mind about his getting off the telephone and called him back wanting him to pursue the issue further, he would refuse. That, at least, in atonement he could do. He very much liked the idea of atonement. He should have got out of publishing years ago, when Higgins's eagle first landed . . .
The waiter, looking up suddenly, was distressed at the look of painful regret and hurried over, anxious to know what was wrong with the bhaji. He waved him away with an elegant gesture of blessing. Already, in his head, he was tonsured and beatified. He sipped his lager as if it were mead. Crap was invading everywhere. He had promoted some of it, and now he was ashamed before his God. And Janice Gentle. If there was one thing that slick cat Perth had done, it was to defend her popular kitten. Now she had gone - well, no one was going to leave that kind of prominence alone. Babbittry, Babbittry - all was Babbittry. Popular fiction. Pah! He banged down his glass in disgust. He had had quite enough of popularity. Look where popularity led to - stringing up blacks and putting gays in hospital. No, no, he had betrayed them all, from Dante to Woolf, from Petrarch to Joyce, betrayed those who believed in quality literature for all. He must now atone.
If he must atone (which he knew he must), then it would be suitably fitting to do it in an itchy robe under ascetic conditions in the heart of those sublime, inspiring Malvern Hills. They had found a hair shirt under Thomas a Becket's ritual finery: the discovery had made men fall to their knees and weep. He popped the last of the onion bhaji into his mouth. Now that was a telling image . . . He would pray for those who had turned their backs on literature and taken the primrose path towards pap. He would pray for them hourly and hope that it got no worse. It couldn't -could i
t? Whatever the answer, he was best out of it.. .
!And leaves the world to darkness and to me ...'
He thought lovingly of the beautiful Rupert. So golden, so fair. He was glad that such a prince had died young. What was wrong with seeing death as a purifying romance? Flanders trenches need not necessarily debase the beauty of the dead lying amongst those blood-red poppies. Rupert had looked up, not down. Heroism, lyricism, beauty . .. poetry. That was what counted, the poetry of the soul, the spirit beyond the body, the romance, the utter, utter romance of the mighty line. Everybody used to read it. Nobody said it was too bloody difficult and they couldn't understand it and please could they have something a bit lighter. Why, the very defeat of War as a Popular Pastime came from the pens of poets: Sassoon, Owen (another beauty), Hardy. Where had the popularity of such writing gone? Brooke. His mind would keep returning to Brooke - he was so extraordinarily beautiful. He smiled regretfully. No more of that, either. He must do penance for the thought.
He wiped his fingers - Pilate-like, he thought. Poetry. He had asked a young man about his views on poetry in this very restaurant a while ago. A nice-looking young man with a strong, square jaw, who was waiting to collect a take-away. The chap was educated, well spoken, apparently cultivated, yet he merely said that he didn't know anything about the stuff - absolutely nothing. And smiled as if he had said he didn't know how to get to Catford by bus. And, oh dear, the temptation to offer to read him some had been acute - but overcome. No. He had chosen celibacy. Henceforth, celibacy. To remember the words of love must be enough.
If Janice Gentle must get sexy, he would wash his hands of it. That the pursuit of religious belief had become mingled with the pursuit of romantic love in the flowering of the Chivalric Ideal seemed acceptable, understandable, forgivable. Innocent, even. But to replace it with the crudity of sexual sentiment? Wretchedly base.
