‘Did you have to spoil my chances?’
‘Chances?’ Tasting the word, Brond found it, like the wine, cheap.
There was so much distraction we exchanged words in a cocoon of privacy.
‘Not for anything you’d understand,’ I complained, sounding petulant.
‘Oh, chances. The girl. Did you try to slip away with her?’
‘Make love not war. Why did you bring me here?’
‘To pass some time. It was too early for where we have to go. Anyway I had been invited and I thought you would enjoy the cultured atmosphere.’
‘Wonderful,’ the girl in front of us said. Like most of the people at the party, she was English by the sound of her. The man who answered was as well.
‘Mm. He tells marvellously funny stories.’
‘Tell us a story,’ the girl called, ‘about your Uncle Danny!’
General laughter.
‘The one about the pig!’
The Irishman grinned vastly. His nose was beaded with sweat.
‘He was known for it in the village,’ he cried. ‘Did I sing you the song about him?’
A rearrangement of the circle left me in front of him. I composed my face into my ethnic interest look – the one that went with visits to folk clubs. As a fellow Celt, I wished him . . . He looked at me and shook his head.
‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘Not with you looking so Scotch and dismal at me.’ The entire crowd smiled and rippled. ‘Like an ould Protestant minister at a funeral.’
In a leprechaun suit and a green hat, he would have made a splendid undoubting Uncle Thomais.
‘Did you ever hear,’ I asked, ‘about the Irishman who blew up the bus? . . . Got his lips all burnt.’
A determined outbreak of small arms talk peppered me away. I refilled a tumbler and found a chair by the wall.
‘A present.’
Brond sat down and put a bottle of wine between us. I recognised it as the one I had thrust on Primo.
‘The condemned man drank a hearty dinner.’ I topped up my glass.
To my surprise I found that some of the consonants had gone rubbery.
‘Don’t overdo it,’ Brond said. ‘We’ll be leaving soon.’
Across the room, I spotted the Hungarian Cockney talking to a man who looked as if he had passed all his exams a long time ago. She had come back then.
‘Suppose I didn’t leave. Suppose I just sat here and finished this bottle and held on to the seat and screamed if you tried to get me to leave.’
‘You know better than that.’
‘No, I don’t.’
I filled my glass which seemed to be emptying by itself. Soon I would have to find another bottle.
‘Suppose— suppose I shouted out loud – right now – that I saw you throwing that boy from the bridge? I mean, right now!’
The words fell out of my mouth sobering me with terror so that I was unable to look at him.
‘I think it was Primo’s boy you killed. I saw you.’
But of course, he knew that. He must have known that from the beginning.
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, and then the second question which, though it shouldn’t have done, mattered more to me: ‘Why didn’t you care that I was there?’ Thinking about that, I rushed on my own destruction. ‘Did the boy overhear something that you couldn’t risk him telling to his father? He was only a child. It must have been something simple enough for him to pass on, but you couldn’t let him tell his father. Simple enough to pass on, even if he didn’t understand it. Or maybe it was a letter you had left lying about? But why would you do that? You’re not careless. Nothing happens unless you want it to happen.’
‘You confuse me with God,’ Brond said, purring. ‘I must say I have a weakness for you. And for Belgian chocolate, of course. And boredom – which is another weakness. I get bored easily.’
‘Do you despise us so much?’
‘I don’t despise a bereaved man enough to torment him with fantasies,’ Brond said sharply. ‘Primo – as you call him – lost his son in a silly stunt on a railway bridge. The boy had been challenged by two friends to cross it on the outside by scrambling across the girders. The two boys saw him fall. A group of spectators, including a police constable, saw him fall. One of the neighbours ran to fetch the father – Primo – and he arrived just as his son fell.’
‘But I saw you,’ I said.
I tried to hold on to that; it had been taken from me once; I tried not to let it happen again.
Brond kept silent until I looked back at him. He was smiling.
‘You saw something or imagine you did in some unnamed place at some time which is indeterminate. And now you’re not sure. How can you be since you did nothing at the time? That must make you wonder about yourself. Suppose now you report this extraordinary event, claim that it happened, and there is no death nor any record of one – But that’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? You must feel like someone in the process of a mental breakdown.’
He shuffled my certainty from me like a conjuror mixing a card into the pack.
‘Stand up!’ he ordered and waited until I did. ‘Let’s settle this nonsense. Take a deep breath. Now, shout out what you imagine you saw!’
The party washed over me as if he had opened a sluice gate. I drowned in that laughter. He was Brond the good friend of Professor Gracemount who had the power to pull strings. I bent and picked up the bottle. My hand held it at the level of his face. It was heavy glass at the level of a face, which was only bone, after all, and flesh. He hung me from the strings of rage and fear, and the little bald Professor came between us ignoring me and took his seat beside him.
By this time the Irishman was coming on like Brendan Behan. He would probably get two extra credits for this from Social Studies – assignment on living down to expectations.
‘How about,’ I asked in the first pause, ‘the number of Irishmen it takes to screw in a nail? Anyone? Eh? Ready? Five! One to hold the nail and four to spin the wall round.’
I thought that was genuinely funny and laughed for a bit.
When I finished, the place had got quieter.
‘How about you and me going outside?’ Uncle Thomais asked. He had done one of those lightning changes from extrovert good nature to black rage.
‘How about . . . How about the way to make an Irishman burn his ear? Do you know how to make an Irishman burn his ear?’ He watched me dangerously. ‘Anybody? Anybody know how to make an Irishman burn his ear?’
Nobody wanted to play that game.
‘I’ll tell you how to make an Irishman burn his ear . . . Phone him while he’s ironing!’
Somebody laughed. It was good to be a success. I joined him and went on for a while after he’d stopped.
‘Time to go.’
Primo had come for me. When I looked back from the door, the group had dispersed. The Irishman was by himself over at the cabinet of drinks. It looked as if I had altered the mood of his celebration.
In the car, the engine throbbed softly. Lights on the dash threw a dim glow up on Primo’s face. Double rows of headlights flowed at us as we came on to a motorway. The needle climbed and successive silhouettes peeled behind us into the darkness.
‘The Irish joke,’ Brond said conversationally. ‘It’s a shoddy response to the troubles across the water. The flood of jokes about Irish stupidity isn’t really a sign of the fabled British sense of humour.’
In the silence, I thought with the clarity of exhaustion about how often I had heard the word British that day.
‘It’s useful politically to persuade your own public,’ he said, ‘that any people you have to treat firmly are sub-human.’
‘The great British public. Primo and me both,’ I said. ‘Scottish soldiers.’
SIXTEEN
As we followed the path of our lights into darkness, Brond took my stick from where it lay across my knees.
‘Are you afraid,’ I asked remembering the bottle that I had he
ld by his face, ‘I might try to use it as a weapon? It’s too light for that.’
‘So much for curiosity,’he said.
His hands moved and the stick lengthened between them.
‘It’s a piece of craftsmanship,’ he said. ‘You don’t appreciate my gifts. It was cored out on a hollow mandrel lathe using a spoon drill and a hand rest – they bore in about twenty inches from each end to meet – then plug here and hold it with a pinned ferrule; there a double silver fitting on the drawing end; lastly it’s packed with two pieces of split cane to hold . . .’his hands moved apart, ‘twenty-seven inches of tempered German steel.’
It was melodramatic and foolish, a kind of joke, except that nothing Brond did was foolish and if he joked it was in a foreign language about events on another planet. He handed me the stick and I took it, not mine now but his, not a dead thing any longer but like a sleeping servant – or a bad master.
He said, ‘It’s their unexpectedness I treasure.’
I wondered if unexpectedness was his euphemism for treachery.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To the capital.’
I had a blurred terrifying image of a house in a quiet town near London – a giant nest of rooms every one empty except for a single chair. In mindless reaction I tried to stretch the stick between my hands. Brond laughed.
‘The Prevention of Crime Act 1953 – it’s against the law to carry a weapon in public without lawful reason or excuse. Did you know that? Anyway, a sword stick really is not a practical weapon in a car.’
I forced my hands to lie still.
‘You gave me the stick in the interrogation room,’ I said, ‘in front of those detectives.’
‘Fortunately,’ Brond said, ‘like yourself, they weren’t sufficiently curious.’
The car slowed as under our lights orange strips on the road rippled. On the roundabout, we passed a sign for the Forth Bridge and took the next exit.
I knew the city now but not why we should be going there.
‘Glasgow has street walkers,’ Brond said as we passed along that long straight entry into the mother of Alba, ‘and an unpalatable collection they are. It has to do, I suppose, with the lack of a substantial middle class. Edinburgh has those, of course, but offers a more genteel service in addition. The advantage, one must suppose, of having the Faculty of Advocates and a plethora of civil servants about the place.’
We came to the Haymarket and went up the hill to the right instead of going forward into Princes Street. After a maze of dark winding streets, we came out on to a broad road and a little later, as I ducked my head searching for some sign I could identify, the car stopped. Primo switched off the engine and I followed Brond out on to the pavement.
Away to our left curved a terrace of substantial houses. In front of us there were stone pillars marking the entrance to a driveway. We seemed to be on a street set above the main road for through the railings behind us the orange lamps shone level with where we stood. Their light followed us into the drive which was longer than it looked from the street, with plenty of space for cars to park discreetly. There was only one at the moment, but I recognised it as a Porsche 911 because the estate owner’s son at home had one; Trailtrow’s son, just turned eighteen, roaring past with a girl beside him, a French girl, an actress, and the calves blockily in flight kicking up their heels.
‘If it is a brothel,’ I said loudly, ‘neighbours in a district like this should object. They should send for the police.’
Primo who was behind me grasped my arm in warning, but Brond looked back seemingly unperturbed.
‘Even discreet brothels,’ he said loudly in a kind of humorous parody of my tone, ‘make a noise from time to time. I expect their neighbours have learned to ignore it.’
A carpet of pebbles gleamed under our feet. Traffic murmured with an effect of distance. We might have been lost deep in the country, coming to knock and ask our way.
The woman who opened the door looked young at first glance, but at a second I thought she was in her fifties at least; and then again there was something not easily defined – she was well dressed, expensively perhaps, nothing immodest – that made me understand Brond had used the exact unvarnished word to describe this place we were about to enter. Maybe that should have made me feel safer, but it didn’t. I didn’t feel happier or safer; just puzzled when she did not admit us at once.
‘Last time was a mistake,’ Brond said, and he leaned forward and spoke to her too softly for me to hear.
‘. . . last time,’ the woman said. ‘. . . last time . . .’
It was eerie to see Brond refused. The illusion of his omnipotence had been imposed upon me. What she was doing filled me with anxiety. I wanted her to stop before something terrible happened. At that moment, however, a car swung into the drive, jerked to a halt in a scatter of pebbles behind the Porsche and ejected a plump bouncy little man whose hair gleamed silver in the light from the open door as he approached.
‘Evening, Maisie.’
He had the air of a familiar guest. As he went to pass us, he glanced at Brond and stopped abruptly.
‘Good God, Maisie!’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re keeping this man on the doorstep. I’ll vouch for—’
‘Mr Smith,’ Brond interrupted him, very easily and as if making a joke. ‘And friends.’
On the ebullience of the little man, all four of us were carried inside. We followed the woman through the hall into what you would have thought of as the front room of a family house. When I looked round for the little man as a protector, he had vanished. There was a table with glasses and bottles and when she asked us what we would drink I noticed for the first time that she had a trace of an Irish accent. The glass she put into my hand was an expensive whisky tumbler, solid and comforting.
When the door opened, I looked round expecting to see the little man who had vouched for us. Instead it was a young girl who might have been seventeen. She was wearing a tweed skirt and a soft wool sweater – the kind of outfit worn by daughters of what my father would call ‘the gentry’ – very genteel.
‘Yours, I think,’ Brond said.
On her cue, she smiled at me.
‘Angela,’ she said. ‘Nice to have you here. Would you like something else to drink?’
I said, no. Mine?
‘I think you’re wanted somewhere else,’ the Irish woman called Maisie said sharply as if she had authority, but the girl ignored her.
‘Perhaps you’d like to see upstairs?’
I looked at her. In my head, I knew she had given me an invitation and what it meant; but in my stomach I did not believe it. Not because of Brond and all the dangers and strangenesses that had brought me here – that would have been too rational. I believed in the place as a brothel. What I did not believe was that any girl who spoke and dressed like the expensive daughters of the gentry would ever get into bed with me.
But she did.
Undressed she still looked expensive. She had little breasts and her stomach was flat. Her skin shone. She looked very healthy.
‘Let’s fuck,’ she said, and it didn’t sound like a whore, but like one of the expensive permissive girls I had dreamed about meeting at a party and seducing with my charm.
I got on top of her and as I slid inside could not help a little cry of triumph.
When we had finished, she half sat up on the pillow and yawned. The sheet was caught round her middle. She held one of her breasts, rubbing her hand on it back and forward.
‘That was your first time,’ she said.
I felt too good to care. In a little while, being one of those who took pleasures sadly, I would start to worry about herpes, crabs and the rest of the sad litany of public lavatories.
‘I’m a late developer. A country boy.’
She had a nice accent. I wondered if it could be genuine. Maybe she was a rich man’s daughter doing this for excitement – and going back later to some rich girls’ boarding school, in Surrey, s
ay, or St Andrews.
‘Should we get up now?’
‘No hurry,’ she said.
From what I had read about prostitution, it seemed to me this must show we were in a very high class establishment indeed. Maybe I would save her from herself; we would marry and I would be taken into daddy’s business.
‘Let’s see what’s going on,’ she said and rolled like a cat out of bed.
I lay and looked at her. She was brown all over except for a narrow band of paler colour round her hips. Even her breasts were lightly tanned.
‘Come on,’ she said and held out her hand.
She was standing in front of what I had taken to be a mirror.
‘Put out the light.’
‘Why?’
‘Go on! Do it!’
I did not know what all this cost but it began to seem like unusual value. The lamp by the bed was lit and I switched it off. At first it was dark but then I could see the shape of her glimmer by the wall. My sex stirred and rose as I moved towards her.
She must have touched the mirror in some way for I found myself looking into a room. It was brightly lit: lamps by the bed and door, an overhead cluster of bulbs, all were on.
Brond was kneeling in front of a woman. He was naked but he still had on his shoes and black socks. I think the idea must have been that this would be humiliating. He was holding up to her a long tube or series of tubes, tapered at one end and with a thick handle at the other.
‘It’s an electric prod,’ the girl’s voice said beside me. ‘They use it on cattle.’
He was showing the woman something on the handle. It might have been a ratchet he turned. I saw his mouth moving but no sound came to us. The woman took the tube from him and laid the end of it between his legs. Suddenly his body convulsed and jerked away. The woman beckoned him back into place. He shuffled forward and she laid the tube again in the same place and nothing happened and then his body jerked away for the second time. The woman stood unmoving and made the same beckoning gesture, but he hesitated. She stood with the tube in her hands and said something and she looked at the handle and made some kind of adjustment.
I felt a hand on my back and the girl ran it down and rubbed against me. Her warm breath tickled my ear.
Brond Page 18
