The Fortunes of Fingel

by Simon Raven

Love from

  Fingel.

  P.S. I almost forgot – the two subalterns who went up with the farmhouse. These were the two graduates I told you of some time back who were commissioned direct from Cambridge. Both of them, it seems, were of Downing College and the Welsh Regiment, so that’s quite all right.

  F.

  Fingel’s Heritage

  “Good news,” said Fingel. “I’ve just had a wire to say my mother’s ill. They think she’s really had it at last.”

  “What’s in it for you?” I said.

  “I split the winnings with my sister. The trouble is that she’s a bitch if ever there was one. I wouldn’t put it past her to get the will changed at the last minute and scoop the whole kitty herself. So I’d better push off to the death-bed p.d.q. to keep an eye on my interests. Good job I’m in England just now.”

  Fingel then departed on compassionate leave and was back three days later.

  “Any luck?” I said, as I watched him unpack in his bedroom.

  “She’s been cured by one of those officious new drugs,” said Fingel morosely. “I left her as fit as a crocodile in the zoo. And that’s not the worst of it.”

  He took a bottle of whisky from his suitcase and poured a generous sextuple into his tooth-glass.

  “My sister,” he said: “she got there first and fielded her four children. Had ’em kneeling in rows by the bed praying for ‘darling Granny’. That went down big with my mama, and for two pins she’d have sent for the lawyer to rub me out of her will there and then as a depraved and childless bachelor – her very words, old bean. But at the last second I managed to trump the trick by saying that I’d arranged a country cottage near here for her to come and convalesce in. Acute psychology, if I do say it myself. Loving prayers cost nothing, but here was I demonstrating my affection in an expensive and apparently optimistic manner. The only trouble was, mama called my bluff. As soon as I told her about the cottage, she was so bucked by the thought of getting something free of charge that she turned the corner, and inside twenty-four hours she was sitting up and eating like a hyena. My sister made the best of a bad job by wheeling her brood in to ‘thank God that darling Granny’s well again’, and then slunk off home to wait for the next round. Meanwhile, I’m stuck with my offer. Unless there’s a relapse, my mother will be here in a week yelling to see this rural retreat I’ve promised her.”

  “At least,” I said, “your expectations are still unaffected. You haven’t yet been crossed out of the will, and if you play the pasties carefully while your mother’s down here, you could do the dirty on your sister and wind up with the jackpot.”

  “You haven’t understood, old bean. You’ve never met my mother. My only hope of staying in her will at all is by steering clear of her altogether. She has fads, you see. One minute she’s a vegetarian, the next she’s a nudist, and anyone near her has got to toe the line or else. If she comes here and announces, for example, that she’s going to join the Seventh Day Adventists, I’ll have to join too or I’ll be finished. I’ve only survived so long because I’ve almost always been abroad and she couldn’t check up on me. I’d get a letter saying I’d got to go in for Yoga or Spiritualism or White Magic, and I’d write back from Africa or wherever saying ‘yes, mummy dear’, and there was an end of it. In theory, old bean, in the last six years I’ve become a Jew and a Moral Re-Armer and a Trotskyite and a Mormon and even, despite my profession, a Pacifist – none of which has been very bothersome because mama was never around to supervise. But now…if she comes here to recuperate…”

  “How much is she worth?”

  “She could cut up for twenty thousand. Ten thou for Fingel, as the stakes are now apportioned. Not to be tossed away lightly.”

  “No. Have you actually found a cottage for her?”

  “Of course not. I thought the thing up on the spur of the moment when I thought she was going to croak at any second.”

  “Well, in view of all you say, you’d better put her off.”

  “Can’t. She’s rearing to come. In a week at most, she says.”

  “In which case you’d better start looking,” I said. “What’s been the matter with her?”

  “Pneumonia. She’s always had a weak chest.”

  “You’ll have your work cut out to find anything suitable for a delicate old lady round here.”

  Fingel took a long pull at his whisky.

  “Do you know, old bean, the same thought has just occurred to me.” For the first time since he had been back in barracks Fingel slowly began to smile. “I shall really have to be…very selective.”

  “I’ve found just the place for mummy,” said Fingel three days later. “Clean, dry, sunny southern outlook, as pretty as a picture on a box of choccies. I had to pay a large deposit, in cash at that, but nothing’s too good for my dear old mother.”

  “How very filial of you.”

  “Yes, isn’t it? Only one thing worries me, old bean. The geyser in the bathroom is old-fashioned and somewhat volatile in its behaviour.”

  “You’d better warn your mother about that.”

  “Yes, of course. Don’t want her to go short of hot water. Now I’ve let myself in for this visit, I’m really going to take good care of her.”

  “She’s coming tomorrow,” said Fingel two days later; “bringing a chum for company.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Bad. The said chum’s an old girl who lived near us during the war. So she knew me as a child, when I was even nastier than I am now, and she takes a low view of my moral character. She’ll be very sharp at faulting Fingel, and she’ll encourage mama to be likewise – not that she’ll need much telling.”

  “They can’t be too beastly to you, after you’ve taken the trouble to find this cottage.”

  “And paid for it.”

  “Precisely,” I said. “That makes them your guests. They ought to be grateful.”

  “Gratitude, old bean, is not on their agenda. Anyway, they both regard me as if I was still in knickers. I used to skulk off to the local cinema when I was meant to be digging for victory in the garden. They’ve never let me forget it.”

  Fingel rang the bell for the Mess waiter.

  “How do you propose to entertain them?” I asked.

  “I’ll play it by ear… Brandy, please, Corporal; my measure for special occasions.”

  Fingel’s measure for special occasions, good or bad but mostly the latter, was about two-thirds of a tumbler.

  “Tomorrow,” continued Fingel as the Mess Corporal went about his mission, “I’ll meet ’em at the station and help ’em move in. Then dinner at The Royal George. I haven’t got much further with my plans than that. Except,” he said, “in one respect: I’ve had Sergeant Mack take a look at that geyser…to make sure it’ll come up to scratch.”

  “What does Mack know about geysers?”

  “He once went on a vehicle fitter’s course. He understands gas pressures.”

  “What did he say about this lot?”

  “That they’re very precarious…as I supposed. He’s shown me how to control them.”

  “And you’ll show your mother and her chum?”

  “Oh yes. Tomorrow when I instal them. As I said the other day,” mused Fingel, whisking his special measure from the Mess Corporal’s tray, “I’m really going to take care of her.”

  “Well?” I said the next evening, when Fingel had returned from dining his mother and her chum at The Royal George.

  “Not well. Ghastly. Guess what the new fad is.”

  “Japanese Cinema?”

  “Even more boring.”

  “Fidel Castro?”

  “Even more of a bloody pest than he is.”

  “Equality for black immigrants?”

  “No. Even more sickening than that.”

  “My imagination fails me.”

  “Teetotalism. In all the years we’ve never had that before. Never as bad as that. In fact, one of the few nice things about my mother was tha
t she liked a drop or two. But now she says drink is the curse of humanity and she made me have water all through dinner.”

  He sobbed slightly and pressed the bell.

  “What’s the programme for tomorrow?”

  “Mama’s chum is going to cook us all dinner at the cottage. Woolton pie, to remind us of the war. Corporal, thank God you’ve come; the best brandy, three of my special measures. At the double, Corporal, left, right, left… Old bean, I don’t think I can bear it. I shan’t even be able to tank myself up before I go, because if she smells alcohol on my breath I’ll be out of her will like a cork out of a pop-gun. I hardly even dare to drink these now” – he snatched two of his special measures from the Mess Corporal’s tray – “in case she’s sneaked up here somehow and is peering through the window.”

  “Pull yourself together,” I said. “You know perfectly well she’s doing no such thing.”

  “Yes,” said Fingel. He drained the first glass and caressed the second. “Yes,” he said; “I was momentarily hysterical. I know perfectly well she’s doing no such thing” – a look of sickly cunning spread over his face – “because I know exactly what she is doing. Running a bath before she goes to bed. She always has her bath at eleven-fifteen at night. At this very moment, old bean, she’ll be entering the bathroom and going up to that geyser…”

  “Salop Evening News,” Fingel read out to me. “‘FATAL EXPLOSION IN CLUNTON COTTAGE. This morning, at about 8.30 a.m., an elderly lady was killed by the explosion of a geyser in the bathroom of Wrekin Cottage, Clunton, near Salop. She was Miss Dora Boot-Bradbury, who was staying at the cottage with Mrs Zenobia Fingel, mother of Captain Fingel of Cawnpore Barracks, Salop. Mrs Fingel was on a visit to her son but has now returned home in consequence of the fatal accident to her companion. Captain Fingel, contacted at the barracks earlier today, said, ‘It was a terrible tragedy. I am beside myself with sorrow’.”

  “It was and I am,” said Fingel, putting down the paper. “It could have been my mother, you see. If she’d followed her usual habit of having a bath before going to bed last night, she’d have caught the bang that undid Dora this morning.”

  “What went wrong, Fingel?”

  “I expect Sergeant Mack gave me incorrect instructions about that geyser. Or perhaps mama and Dora didn’t understand what I told them about it.”

  “You know what I really mean, Fingel. What went wrong about your mother’s bath-time? Why didn’t she have her bath in the usual way last night?”

  “Good question,” said Fingel. “What I’d forgotten – I mean, what you are now forgetting – is that people who have just had pneumonia are very cautious about taking hot baths in case they overheat themselves and catch a chill or something. Or so my mother was telling me when I saw her on to her train this afternoon. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I didn’t much trust that geyser, and I thought I’d let Dora have the first go.’ ”

  “Does she blame you for what happened?”

  “‘Blame’ isn’t exactly the word. She’s one of Dora’s executors, old bean, and she’s down in Dora’s will for a clear twenty thou, she says, and she’ll be into the lawyer’s lair the minute he opens up tomorrow morning. So I suppose,” said Fingel, pressing the bell, “that things could have turned out worse. At least I’ve packed mama off home after only one evening on water, and now there’s double the money in the pot the next time I throw for it.”

  Pandora’s Trunk

  “Take a look at this,” Fingel said.

  “This” was a glossy book of highly coloured and highly obscene photographs, quite ingeniously done if you liked that kind of thing, with a commentary in one of those languages which puts little circles over “È” and “j” instead of dotting them.

  “Where did you get it?” I enquired.

  “From the owner of the Urania.”

  The Urania was Fingel’s favourite and most long-suffering restaurant in Limassol.

  “He got it,” Fingel continued, “from a sailor on a Danish boat which plies from Copenhagen. It calls in here at Cyprus every two months or so. The Danes,” he said heavily, “rather specialise in stuff like that.”

  “So one had heard.” And so one had. The fact remained that one had never seen any of it before, or certainly not so luxuriously laid out and so lavish in intimate detail. “Stuff like that” was in those days (the early sixties) a very great rarity, at any rate on Cyprus. I turned the pages with relish – until suddenly the book was whisked from my hands and locked with a clang into Fingel’s black tin trunk.

  “It’ll cost you a fiver,” said Fingel, “if you want to look at it any more.”

  “You old Jew.”

  “I’m going into business,” said Fingel; “I’m an acting Major now, you know, and I’ve got to start thinking of my old age.” He then explained further. It appeared that Alexopoulos, the owner of the Urania, maddened by Fingel’s huge and unpaid account but otherwise well-disposed, had decided to put Fingel in the way of making some money. Alexopoulos would procure large supplies of rude books from his Danish connection and would sell them to Fingel (at a profit though of course on credit). Fingel in turn would set up as distributor within our battalion, a function which his present post as Field Officer i/c Welfare, Amenities and Entertainments would greatly facilitate. He would charge a price of between two and ten pounds sterling per book, fifty per cent being refundable, not in cash but in reductions on future purchases, if the book was returned to him in good order and within a week. In this way, the theory went, he would shortly acquire enough ready money to settle with Alexopoulos both for the books themselves and for the quantities of food and drink lately devoured at the Urania.

  “And then of course,” said Fingel, “I can start piling it up on my own account. There’ll be a complete change of stock, in case anyone gets bored, every time that Dane docks with his ship.”

  “You do realise,” I said, “that even the Cypriots have laws about pornography. Archbishop Makarios doesn’t care for it.”

  “The Cypriot police won’t trouble us.”

  “You’re also committing an offence under British Military Law: conspiring to corrupt the morals of Her Majesty’s soldiers, or something of the sort.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Fingel, “I had just thought of that. So I’m going to keep all the goodies in here” – he rapped the black tin trunk – “and put the trunk itself into Welfare and Amenity Stores. RQMS Jameson’s in charge of the Stores, and I’ll make him sign. So if there should be trouble…”

  “…It’s on somebody else’s signature. But who’s going to hand the stuff out and collect the cash?”

  “Ah,” said Fingel: “who but Sergeant Mack?”

  Sergeant Sweenie Mack was by now a very old familiar of Fingel’s. Whenever Fingel was shunted on to a new job, Mack always contrived to follow him before long in some subordinate capacity and assist him in whatever enterprise was in train. True to form, Mack had recently joined Fingel’s office as “Chief Clerk, Welfare and Amenity” and was doubtless eager to get his teeth into some such squalid task as Fingel was now proposing for him.

  “Sweenie Mack will have a key to my trunk,” Fingel now enlarged, “the only key there is apart from mine. He’ll slip round the lines with three or four books at a time, explain the system, get it all going. So in fact, you see, personally I shan’t have anything to do with it at all.”

  “What’s Sweenie’s cut?”

  “Five per cent.”

  “Pretty manky.”

  “Yes. I caught him sniffing after one of the band-boys again, so he’s in no position to bargain just now.”

  For three weeks or so (I gathered from Fingel) everything went very well. The black tin trunk, with Fingel’s name now painted out and Theatre Props (Amenities) painted in on top of it, reposed safely in the Welfare and Amenity Stores in nominal charge of the RQMS. Sergeant Mack, as Chief Welfare Clerk, had the entrée to the Welfare Stores, which, being merely a distant and minor branch of the ma
in Battalion Stores, were normally presided over by a genial dipsomaniac called Lance-Corporal Sphinck, whose supervisory efforts were minimal. Mack therefore had no difficulty in visiting the trunk with his key and obtaining or returning books whenever he wished. The market was good and the turnover brisk; for the district in which we were encamped offered little diversion to our troops and, as Fingel put it, “illustration assists imagination”. Thus the project combined profit with benefaction, Fingel was speedily enabled to pay all his dues to Alexopoulos, and satisfactory negotiations were already under way for the purchase of a fresh consignment on the next appearance of the Dane – when suddenly disaster loomed, in a totally unexpected form and heralded by Sergeant Sweenie Mack, who arrived gibbering in Fingel’s quarters one evening just as we were about to set out for a celebrative dinner at the Urania.

  “Yon trunk, sir,” said Sergeant Mack: “it’s gone from the Welfare Stores.”

  “Gone?”

  “Signed out, Your Honour.”

  “Signed out, Sergeant? By whom, for God’s sake?”

  “By the Colonel, sir. As Your Honour kens, there’s to be a Fancy Dress Ball for the officers and their ladies at the Polo Club on Hallowe’en. So the Colonel comes enquiring at the Welfare Stores: ‘Ma wifey’s avid to wear something special for the Ball, Corporal Sphinck,’ he says; ‘have ye no some costumes for theatricals or the like?’ Whereby that drunk loon Sphinck sohow stabs his paw through a mist of meths and shows the Colonel Your Honour’s own trunk marked Theatre Props, and the Colonel asks for the key, and Sphinck says he knows of none, and the Colonel calls him a daft booby and orders the trunk taken to his quarters – ‘Foreby we’ll get it open somehow,’ says he, ‘and ma wifey can have her pick’.”

  “It’s gone to the Colonel’s house already?”

  “Already, Your Honour.”

  “How many of those – er – books were there in it?”

  “At least ten, sir, which weren’t out the noo.”

  “Let us all keep quite calm,” said Fingel. “All that is known of that trunk is that it was delivered to the Welfare Stores for safe keeping and was signed for by the RQMS, who is officially responsible for those Stores. No one is known to have had anything to do with the trunk since…unless Sphinck has spotted you getting at it, Sergeant Mack?”