The Twilight of the Vilp

by Paul Ableman

  My wife and I emerged from the shrubbery and then, at my suggestion, retired into it again while I performed certain adjustments to her attire. We emerged once more to find the garden tranquil, the house in its customary place and my publisher gone. I felt that the moment was an equivocal one for complaining about over-population in the house and I repaired once more to my study, leaving my wife to hoe up some nasturtiums. I wrote some more preliminary notes but they were unsatisfactory and I have not retained them.

  In this way time passed. My publisher often visited us to continue surveying the house. He became tolerably friendly with the young telephone repair-man and they often played dubious games with my daughters in one of the bedrooms. The Danes resumed battering on the kitchen door but we rather deflated them one evening by inviting them in. Wilhelmina was delighted but also embarrassed. She whispered to me:

  “I’m engaged to five of them.”

  However, I personally derived much pleasure from their society. They talked about cars and the difficulties of finding a chauffeur. They now owned seventeen cars. Only three could drive and one of these three had taken a solemn vow that he never would. The other two drove incessantly, racing up to the house in one car, transferring to another and racing off again but they all agreed that they were still not getting full value from the vehicles.

  Wilhelmina, a very pleasant girl of about seventeen, moved amongst the Danes making arrangements for the weddings. Later my publisher and the telephone youth joined us but they contributed little to the evening. Whenever I glanced at one of them I observed that he was glancing narrowly at the other.

  I came to admire those Danes and I was proud to think that my daughter was going to marry five of them. They told me many interesting things about their own country. It is not, I think, widely known that very few people in Denmark own more than seventy automobiles. The Danes, I learned, are fond of bread and it is common for them to eat this substance. I tactfully inquired why they had left their own delightful land. Wilhelmina immediately cried:

  “They left Denmark to make love to me but I won’t let them!”

  At this the Danes burst into a ribald Danish song and my publisher purchased the English rights.

  We had many such jolly evenings.

  The seasons changed. Men with shovels came and purged the house of rotting beef. I received favourable replies to my three letters. Before I left to visit my three prospective heroes in their homes, there were a number of things to be settled. I called on my publisher and asked him, in view of our long association, not to dispossess me. He led me solicitously into an adjoining room. There, amongst the normal paraphernalia of a busy publisher’s office, was a model of a bright new architectural development with skyscrapers, paved walks, garages, theatres, night-clubs, a shopping district —a great community planned down to the last tiny detail, which was a scrawl on one of the walls reading “Dane—go home!”

  “Magnificent, Arthur!” I enthused.

  “Redevelopment,” he affirmed crisply. “Your home.”

  “But will it all fit?”

  “We haven’t finally decided the scale.”

  I saw that if his plans had matured to this extent there was little chance of a reprieve for us.

  “It looks like we’ll have to find another home,” I murmured, a trifle sadly.

  “What?” cried Arthur, genuinely disturbed. Leave no. 44 Cob Lane? Where your children were born? Where you took your young bride? What are you saying?”

  “Well it looks like we’ll have to.”

  But why? Why, man? Why do you say that?”

  “Because you’re going to turn it into a huge urban housing estate. Personally I doubt whether it will all fit but that’s what you intend, isn’t it?”

  Arthur looked haggard. He barked something at a typist and she barked back at him. Then he absently picked up a manuscript and read a few lines:

  “During the war my grandmother commanded a submarine—” then he dashed the manuscript to the desk once more. “Dash it, you can’t just—just sever your roots like this. Clive, I’ll never forgive you if you do this to Erica.”

  “Mona,” I corrected him. “No, Madeleine really.”

  “What does Madeleine say about this insane scheme of yours?”

  “I haven’t told her yet.”

  “I should hope not! Now, Clive, just you drink this camphorated whisky and then go straight home and forget all about it.”

  I gulped the fluid which the barking typist now handed me. It had a vile, searing taste suggestive of deadly poison and, in fact, it turned out that it was deadly poison but my strong constitution enabled me to survive it, as my doctor subsequently explained. Arthur now draped his arm affectionately over my shoulder and escorted me to the door, murmuring to his secretary, sotto voce, before we reached it:

  “Rush plans for converting 44 Cob Lane.”

  Then he gripped my hand with a firm, gentle pressure that expressed his enduring sympathy and regard. I returned home feeling vaguely uneasy, both at the nature of our conversation and at the gripping pains in my stomach which soon became so severe that my wife had to phone for an ambulance and I spent some time in hospital.

  I did not, in fact, regret the interlude. For the first time in years I had a chance to do some hard brooding. At home there were so many demands upon me: children to be classified, my wife to be greeted, my work, the garden, Danes and telephones—now, for a brief period, there were no overloads on the giddy circuits of my brain.

  I took stock of things. Here I was, rich, world-famous, poisoned—and what did it all amount to? When we are most secure, publishers turn our homes into giant communities. Why? Who? Was it real? Europe, Cob Lane, the solar system? Or merely a figment of a titanic dream? And who was the dreamer? Was he healthily asleep or in a stupor? Might he be drunk? And what was his dream? Was it history? The Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Kilburn Empire? Was this all? Was it perhaps too much? Could it be just the right amount? I could reach no final answer to these questions and the knowledge irked me.

  “What do you think of it all?” I asked a nurse who was occupied with a nozzle behind me.

  “It’s a job,” she replied glumly. “It’s got to be done.”

  Perhaps that was the key. A job! A job that has to be done. Nations, wars, school fees—yes, but who was the employer? And might it not, at this stage, be a good idea to strike? Once again my thoughts recoiled back upon themselves and then slumped into a coma like gorged serpents.

  Upon discharge from hospital I realized that I had not, in fact, solved any of the ultimate riddles of the universe and I regretted this.

  The day of my departure to visit my prospective heroes arrived. There were numerous telegrams wishing me “Bon Voyage”. One from an admirer in Liverpool asserted, with a crisp simplicity that I found most affecting: “You are greater than Ruben Bismuth.” There was no mention of Ruben Bismuth in any volume of my reference library but I did not allow this to mitigate in the slightest my pleasure in the assurance. My publisher sent a brief note, enclosing elevations of the municipal sports stadium that would one day tower where our kitchen now stood. I took a last turn in the garden with my wife. Two of my daughters flitted out of the shrubbery as we approached and, shortly afterwards, a young man carrying a coil of wire. When he saw me, he muttered:

  “I’m tired of girls,” and gazed at me with a hard reproachful stare. I recognized him as a young man called Elvin Beale.

  “Why is that, Elvin?” I asked.

  But it seemed that I had made a mistake. He was not Elvin Beale but merely a telephone repairman and I could not refrain from chiding my wife for allowing our gentle girls to consort with a low-born technician. I ordered the fellow off the premises and he shrugged and departed, leaving, I subsequently discovered, two of my daughters pregnant.

  “Well, my dear,” I sighed, slipping my arm around my wife’s waist. “I am afraid once more I must leave you. How many children have we got?”


  “Quite a few. Where are you going?”

  “Up North I think—possibly South—I haven’t worked it out yet. Have we got nine children?”

  “Easily. What are you going to do, sell pots and pans?”

  “Incidentally, don’t be surprised if they start converting the place into a garden city. Have we got as many as twelve children?”

  “Yes, I think we have. I think we’ve got at least twelve. But Roger—Clive, that is, the market for pots and pans is bad these days.”

  “Well, don’t you worry, I won’t sell any pots and pans. Twelve, eh?”

  “Twelve what?”

  “Twelve—twelve what?—”

  I had been allowing my thoughts to flow on ahead and they had run into some rather bad territory. While I had been trying to clear a passage for them, shifting obstacles and dredging a channel, she had suddenly uttered a numeral. I now looked at her fair hair, fair and flowing, like strands of sunlight, waves and particles, with no corpuscles to interrupt the flow, and felt beneath my hand her body, her flesh and underneath her flesh her fat and her viscera and her bones and beneath the flowing hair the brains of my wife—and I felt confused and yet touched.

  “Irma!” I sighed, drawing her towards me.

  “Good-bye, Raoul,” she sighed back.

  TWO

  Professor Pidge proved to be a short, distinguished-looking man with tight black curls seething on his head. He gestured with lazy elegance, emphasizing some quaint point. His audience of alert young citizens—females, males, both varieties—watched with amazed delight the intricate and yet bold whirl of his arms as they rose, looped and fell again.

  I stood at the back of the lecture room, with its zinc sink and velvet curtains, with its wooden chairs and its faint, distinctive smell of dihydrohiccupic acid, that curious acid that has three bongo radicals in the tertiary chain, and listened with attention.

  “Zoology,” the professor was explaining, “can best be regarded as a focal point for the study of the zoological sciences. We are all acquainted with animals and these may take the form of little dogs, large dogs, spotted dogs, Mexican hairless dogs and even mutant varieties that have long, elegant curls and distasteful eyelashes. In addition to dogs, we may adduce monkeys, pigs and giraffes which constitute significant additions to our understanding of nature. Brinsley of Oatmeal disputes this point but I fancy I rather worsted him the other day with my article in The Giraffe—some of you have probably seen it—where I described in detail the disgraceful ontology of the poodle. Anyway, I don’t want to say any more on this subject—you may well have dogs and ideas of your own. Suppose you all do me an essay on ‘The Cod as a Cuddly Pet’.”

  “Just one thing, sir?” a young female student asked.

  “Yes, Miss Pholp?”

  “Is it true that spores are tiny little floating things?”

  “Yes, that’s quite true. Spores love to float—it’s one of the most characteristic things about them. Mark you, they’re not good swimmers and they hate it when its rough but on the average fine day around Clacton or Ilfracombe you’ll find plenty of spores floating.”

  “Thank you.”

  The students wandered out and Professor Pidge approached me:

  “Clive Witt?”

  “Yes. You’re Professor Pidge.”

  “Indeed I am. Hope I didn’t bore you too horribly?”

  “Not for a moment. I take a keen interest in the natural sciences. As a matter of fact I have an idea I took a degree here in the natural sciences years ago.”

  “You were a student here in Mushton?”

  “I believe I was. I seem to remember retorts and things. I believe we dissected magnets—isn’t there something called Stirrup’s Principle?”

  “Possibly. May have something to do with Physics or Chemistry or Upholstery—closed book to me. I’m a specialist.”

  I was surprised at this for I would have expected a senior lecturer to have had a firm grounding in all the sciences as well as a leering acquaintance with the fine arts. I think Pidge was being too modest for, as I came to know him better, I realized that, in fact, he had a fine and richly-stocked brain.

  “Would you care,” he suggested, “to glance round the lab?”

  “I’d love to.”

  We went into the adjoining laboratory. The first thing we saw there was a young girl sitting on one of the benches with her skirt drawn up. She glanced absently in our direction but, I was gratified to notice, made no move to adjust her skirt.

  “This is the lab,” remarked Pidge. “That girl there is Sonya, an exchange student. I’ve forgotten what we exchanged her for but I’m convinced we got the best of it. She’s not a good scholar—can’t tell an ant-eater from an umbrella—but she’s always pulling up her skirt and letting us see her legs. Pull your skirt a bit higher, Sonya,” he crisply addressed the girl, but she failed to respond. “I say, pull your skirt a bit higher.”

  “Why?” the girl asked, with a slight foreign accent.

  “So that we can see more of your legs. This is Clive Witt, the novelist.”

  “No, it isn’t,” muttered the girl. “It’s a bull pelican.”

  “Anyway, pull your skirt higher.”

  “I don’t want to. I like it just the way it is.”

  “Let’s glance round the lab,” Pidge suggested. “She’ll probably slide it higher of her own accord if we pretend we’re not watching. Now—have you ever seen one of these before?”

  I considered the intricate piece of apparatus he had indicated. It consisted of a jumble of glass and wires. I noticed at once that it was not ticking and I assumed that this was due to the absence of an oscillator. Green fluid was prancing about inside it. On the intricate control panel someone had pasted a detailed diagram of a naked girl swimming about in a fish tank.

  “I see that it has a rheostat linked in staggered series to a diaphragm-siphon,” I murmured thoughtfully. “Could it be a Canning Diffuser?”

  Pidge glanced at me with involuntary respect.

  “It’s nothing of the kind, of course,” he replied crisply, “but you certainly speak the language.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Eh?”

  Pidge gazed thoughtfully at the apparatus. Some of the green fluid swerved giddily up a glass spiral and spurted on to the floor. Pidge stooped, moistened his finger with the fluid and then sniffed: “Smells like Soya sauce. Stuff you put on chop suey.”

  “You think it’s Soya sauce?”

  “I said it smells like it. Soya sauce is normally brown. Sonya,” he snapped, turning smartly, “kindly pull up your skirt.”

  “Immoral old dog,” the girl grumbled, but she did raise her skirt an inch or two more. Then she addressed me: “He’s forgotten what that thing is.”

  “Possibly I have,” conceded Pidge, “but it’s only one of dozens of important experiments that I’m simultaneously conducting. I leave the routine to my senior students. Here,” he plucked me courteously by the sleeve. “Come and look at this experiment over here. All these little pots have some kind of culture in them.”

  We continued on round the laboratory, inspecting numerous subtle and ingenious experiments designed to further man’s knowledge of the natural world. We were standing over a superficially dull experiment, merely a little cup with fluid in it, and Pidge was explaining that, in reality, this was the first really promising attempt to use antibodies from the serum of an athletic eel to immunize sharks, when Sonya laughed coarsely and said:

  “Here, take a look at this, boys.”

  We turned and found that she had drawn her skirt back almost as far as her thighs.

  “This beats antibodies,” muttered Pidge. “Come on, let’s look at her legs.”

  We crossed the laboratory and stood in front of Sonya, looking with attention at her legs. She asked me:

  “Why are you just a bull pelican?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You give me that impression. Oh, I know the truth.
I am a bad student. I should go back home and marry someone. That would be best.”

  “Not at all,” urged Professor Pidge. “Come with us, Sonya. Have dinner with us this evening. You’re agreeable, Witt?”

  “Certainly.”

  We abandoned our tour of the laboratory and left together. We were silent as we walked through the quiet streets of Mushton. It was a pleasant evening and yet there was a distinct sense of conspiracy. I could discern no direct evidence that anyone was conspiring and yet I could not shed the idea. I wondered if the others had noticed it.

  “What,” I asked gaily, “the hell is going on?”

  “Conspiracy,” murmured Sonya. “There is real conspiracy.”

  “So I wasn’t imagining it. But what sort of conspiracy?”

  “It is conspiracy to cause a fire.”

  “Nonsense,” urged Pidge stoutly, but I noticed that he shivered slightly in spite of the warm summer air.

  We entered a small restaurant and ordered duck. Both my companions were silent as we ate. Sonya was particularly silent. I surmised that she might be brooding on the shame of displaying her legs to professors, visiting novelists and possibly others. We finished the duck and ordered pancakes and vodka but the silence remained virtually unbroken until, a little later, Pidge and I stood side by side in a secluded part of the restaurant. Then:

  “Do you know what I’ve done?” he asked passionately. “Do you know what’s happened to me?”

  “No I don’t.”

  “That girl’s got into my mind, that one with the legs?”

  “Sonya?”

  “God, isn’t she glorious?”

  “She is rather glorious.”

  “She’s moved into my mind, legs and all! Witt, I don’t want her there! I’m dedicated to research.”