by H. E. Bates
‘Well, so long.’ These, Mr Featherstone thought as he heard the gear-lever grate in again, were the most blessed words of his life and he actually felt the lorry moving forward. Then it stopped, the cause being that Niggler had one final, cheerful confidential piece of information to impart.
He imparted it with thumb up:
‘I just remembered. I took the number of that car: EKO 461 it was.’
Some hours later, as it seemed, Mr Featherstone woke from an uneasy, shag-drugged doze. Spring rain was falling in tiny beads on the windscreen and through the arcs made by the windscreen wipers he could see open chalky stretches of downland dotted about with occasional greening beech-trees. Niggler was humming some disconnected snatches of a pop tune and driving into the gentle rain at a steady thirty-five.
An immediate spasm of guilt made Mr Featherstone look back through the window of the cab to see if the truck was being followed but Niggler put an end to any speculation of that sort by asking in his ebullient offhand way how Mr Featherstone liked his chicken done?
‘I like mine with stuffing,’ Niggler said.
The thought of chicken, let alone stuffing, brought sharp prickles of nausea to Mr Featherstone’s throat. Niggler, oblivious of any idea that the conversation might be giving pain, licked his lips with a meaty smack. He liked plenty of onion stuffing, he told Mr Featherstone, and nice bread sauce.
In a weakened, neutral voice Mr Featherstone found himself asking:
‘How much farther is Salisbury?’
‘About fifteen. Ought to be there about six.’
‘I think I shall say goodbye to you at Salisbury.’
Niggler, with something like reproach, said he wouldn’t hear of it. It was a bleedin’ long way to Penzance yet. Besides, they were going to kip at Salisbury and have dinner there. Wasn’t that all right?
‘Well, actually—’
‘Actually what?’ Niggler said. He was deftly rolling another cigarette, one-handed. ‘I got some nice friends there. Two old ladies. I often kip there. Don’t cost a penny.’
‘Well, it’s very kind of you, but—’
‘But what?’
Mr Featherstone had to confess to himself that he didn’t know. He had less than fifteen shillings in his pocket and the fare to Penzance alone would have been more than four pounds. It wasn’t always easy hitching lifts in the rain either. A cheap dinner and a free bed would save him a lot.
‘The dinner won’t cost nothing neither,’ Niggler said. ‘The old ladies’ll cook it. Or rather I shall.’
Mr Featherstone, stammering, started to feel oppressively faint again.
‘You don’t mean to say that somebody else is going to be involved in those chickens?’
‘ ’Course they’re involved. That’s what I got ’em for. I always try to take ’em a couple. Or a brace of pheasants sometimes. Or a goose.’
Mr Featherstone sat quiet, simply watching the hills, the windscreen wipers and the rain.
‘Like a fag?’ Niggler said. ‘I can roll another.’
With a stammering politeness Mr Featherstone rejected the offer of a fag. Niggler, with customary deftness, lit up again, filling the air with monstrous fog.
A second or two later Niggler was addressing Mr Featherstone in tones of inoffensive reproach, almost a lecture:
‘I believe you’re a bit worried about them cockerels. Well, you don’t want to be. They’re doing somebody a good turn. It’s just a kind act, see? When you see them two old ladies sucking on the bones you’ll understand, see? You’ll see real happiness.’
‘But you say you do it regularly,’ Mr Featherstone protested. ‘Aren’t you ever afraid of getting caught?’
‘You’ll see real happiness,’ Niggler said. ‘Real proper happiness. It’ll do your heart good.’
Mr Featherstone, half-asphyxiated, felt curiously chastened and could think of nothing to say. Niggler puffed heavily at shag, eyes half-closed against the smoke’s bitter tang.
‘By the way, what do you study? What are you a student of, I mean?’ Niggler gave a rousing, shag-choked guffaw. ‘Form?’
‘Form?’
‘The horses. The gee-gees. Don’t follow the gee-gees?’
Mr Featherstone said he was afraid not. He couldn’t afford to follow the gee-gees. He hadn’t the cash to spare. No: he was a student of philosophy.
‘What does that mean exactly?’
Well, it was hard to explain in simple terms, Mr Featherstone said.
‘Not birds, is it?’
‘No, no. That’s ornithology.’
‘Studying this means going to college, I reckon?’
University, Mr Featherstone explained. Oxford. He thought a few moments longer in silence and then said:
‘I’ve been trying to think of the proper definition of philosophy. I think I’ve got it more or less right. I suppose it would go something like this: it’s the love of wisdom; in actual usage, the knowledge of phenomena as explained by, and resolved into, causes and reasons, powers and laws.’
A stunned silence greeted Mr Featherstone’s words. The fag almost dropped from Niggler’s lips.
‘Of course that’s the merest essence of it,’ Mr Featherstone went on. ‘In a narrow sense it’s almost the equivalent of metaphysics, but usually it’s understood as also including all the mental and moral sciences such as logic, psychology, ethics and so on.’
‘Blimey.’
‘Of course there are all sorts of sections, or used to be. Natural philosophy for example—’
‘Does it do any good?’
‘Well, it really isn’t a question of doing good. Philosophy really denotes a systematic body of general conceptions—’
‘Yes, but blimey, what’s it for?’
By now Niggler’s fag had gone completely out. Utterly unable to carry the conversation further he too stared blindly at hills, windscreen wipers and rain. Presently the fag actually dropped from his lips and Mr Featherstone said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice that he would try to put the whole thing into simpler, more fundamental terms.
‘Take for instance you. What do you reckon life is made up of? I mean how do you yourself see it? People, I mean. What sort of categories do people seem to you to fall into?’
Niggler came sharply to life with a spontaneous laugh, full of sudden understanding and cheerful gusto.
‘Only two,’ he said. ‘Mugs and those who ain’t.’
‘Well, that,’ Mr Featherstone said, ‘is your philosophy.’
‘It is?’
‘Then take Hitler.’
Niggler, affronted, visibly recoiled, as if he greatly resented being bracketed with Hitler.
‘The bastard,’ he said.
‘Hitler’s philosophy,’ Mr Featherstone went on, ‘could be described as a Machiavellian one. Unlike Aristotle, who—’
‘Mackiwhat?’
‘Machiavellian,’ Mr Featherstone proceeded to explain. ‘Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat and statesman who thought that any means, however unscrupulous or lawless, were justified in order to establish strong governmental power. The same could be said of Krushchev—’
‘Another rum ’un,’ Niggler said. ‘The big fat frog.’
Mr Featherstone stammered on, warming up. He invited an astonished Niggler to consider Aristotle. It was generally held that Aristotle was the greatest of all philosophical thinkers. He was in a sense the father of it all. Dante for instance had called him ‘the master of those who know.’ His first principle had been adopted from one of Plato – that of the self-activity of an intelligent first cause of all. On the other hand—
Stunned to a new and deeper silence, Niggler could only roll another fag. He rolled it like a man in a dream and finally let it dangle from his pouchy lips unlit. This silence lasted for a full five minutes, at the end of which he came to himself to hear Mr Featherstone say:
‘That was the sign for Salisbury. We must be nearly there.’
Niggler immediately cast quick,
irritated eyes about the landscape, cursing, as if unable to believe he was actually where he was.
‘Gawd blimey, Feather, you gone and made me overshoot the bleedin’ turning. It’s a bleedin’ mile back there.’
‘I’m most terribly sorry,’ Mr Featherstone said. ‘I’d really no idea.’
With every lock of the wheel as he turned the truck round Niggler cursed good-naturedly, saying finally:
‘Mustn’t overshoot the old ladies. They’re expectin’ me. I promised ’em the cockerels last week.’
‘You mean you actually planned that business? It wasn’t a sudden impulse?’
‘Gawd blimey, no. I always plan it. I note ’em comin’ one way and nick ’em goin’ the other. Don’t believe in impulses, Feather. They scare me.’
With this philosophical touch Niggler gave one of his stentorian croaky laughs and finally lit the fag. Fresh clouds of shag smoke filled the air so thickly that it was suddenly impossible to see out of the cab and Niggler was actually forced to stop for a minute and clean the windscreen with his sleeve.
Peering through the glass, he announced that the rain had stopped and that it was going to be a fine spring evening after all. Thinking of the cockerels, he chuckled. Mr Featherstone’s bewildering discourse on the philosophies was far behind him now. From now on it was chickens, stuffing and the old bread sauce.
‘Look.’ He nudged Mr Featherstone in the ribs, at the same time half-blinding him with a positively volcanic eruption of shag. ‘That’s where we’re going, Feather. In them gates. In there.’
A pair of rusting iron gates that might once have belonged to a palace of sorts were pushed back from two stone pillars surmounted by a pair of preening eagles, one of which had lost its head.
Through these and into a forest of long neglected laurel and rhododendron, everywhere entwined by brambles, Niggler drove the truck, explaining at the same time that it was here, on a late windy December afternoon, while changing a wheel, that he had first met the old ladies, Miss Montifiore and Miss Pearce.
‘It was bleedin’ mucky and cold. They took pity on me and asked me in for a cuppa and they bleedin’ near hung me on the Christmas tree.’
At the end of the bramble-shrouded drive a house of indeterminate design, part Tudor, part Victorian, part Scottish baronial, rose from a square of thistle-infested lawn not unlike a forlorn terra-cotta memorial to some event long forgotten.
Half way up the drive Niggler started sounding the horn, at the same time croaking with laughter so much that the fag dropped out of his mouth. He made no attempt to pick it up but instead invited Mr Featherstone, with enthusiastic cheerfulness, to look ahead.
Mr Featherstone did so and suddenly saw, on the gravel square in front of the house, as if in answer to Niggler’s raucous signal on the horn, two female figures waving hands.
‘Oh! Niggler, how absolutely thrilling to see you.’
Miss Montifiore, to whom Mr Featherstone presently found himself being introduced, was pinkish, thin and supple, rather like a stick of early rhubarb. Her movements were gracious; her voice was full of high, piercing charm.
‘Hullo, Niggler, you old so-and-so. How goes it, eh? Good show.’
Miss Pearce, forthright, short and over-plump, was pudding-like in her physical excesses. She was wearing slacks of dark green corduroy and a white silk shirt with a golden tie. Her bosom was of such curious, elongated shape that she seemed to have been obliged to wrap the lower parts of it round her waist. Her large face, with its oiled black hair brushed clean back in masculine fashion, showed none of the distortions that Niggler’s bore. Instead it merely seemed that someone had once blown it up too high with a pump and then forgotten to let out the air.
‘Oh! we don’t live in the house,’ Miss Montifiore said to Mr Featherstone, who had felt constrained to make polite remarks about it. ‘Couldn’t possibly. Taxation wouldn’t allow that, even if we could get the servants, which we can’t.’
It was about this time that Mr Featherstone noticed that Miss Pearce always called her companion Monty and that she in turn was called the Pearce.
‘Got a flat over the stables,’ the Pearce said. ‘God, it’s bloody good to see you, Niggler.’ The Pearce actually slapped him on the back and then caught him one-handed, impulsively, in stout embrace. ‘Going to kip with us for the night? Always welcome, dear boy.’
Niggler thanked her with a ‘Ta very much’ and asked if they’d had any more trouble with rats since he was here the time before?
‘None whatever,’ Monty said. ‘Your wonderful beer-trap seems to have done the trick.’
‘Beer-trap?’ Mr Featherstone said. The four of them were half way to the stables now and he was brought up sharply.
‘Niggler has invented this marvellous beer-trap,’ the Pearce explained. ‘What he does or how we’ve no idea. For all I know he may say incantations over the damn things, but the fact is they disappear.’
‘I wasn’t aware that rats liked beer,’ Mr Featherstone said, suddenly coldly suspicious.
‘Then you’ve never been inside a brewery,’ Niggler said. ‘You see ’em layin’ about there drunk as newts.’
By the way, he went on to explain, Mr Feather was a student of philosophy on his way to Penzance. Was it all right if he kipped down too?
‘Oh! the more the merrier,’ the Pearce said. ‘Any friend of Niggler’s – by the way, did you ever see your little Fraülein Spiegler again? The Austrian girl you brought for the night? She was a student too, wasn’t she? Pretty little thing. I rather fell for her.’
Niggler, ignoring all recollection of the pretty little Austrian thing, suddenly stopped and cursed loudly.
‘Blast it. Forgot the cockerels.’
Mr Featherstone said he would go back for the cockerels and ten minutes later Niggler was at the kitchen sink, drawing and plucking them. Monty was laying the table for dinner and the Pearce was cutting up large creamy curds of broccoli, the last of the May Queens, she said. Mr Featherstone was sitting in an ancient wicker-chair, peeling potatoes.
‘I’m afraid everyone here has to do a stint,’ Monty said. ‘You see, we get absolutely no help at all except Effie, who does the rough.’
All of a sudden the Pearce, engaged now in chopping parsley and onions for stuffing, let out a deep bark of enquiry, more masculine than any male.
‘Dying to ask you, Niggler. What about the turf, dear boy? How did we fare?’
Niggler, busy cleaning up the birds, paused to say ‘Ah! the horses. I got a note of ’em all somewhere. I’ll get the stuffing in first though and then we’ll tot everything up.’
‘You mean we won?’
Niggler gave one of his most spontaneous, croaky laughs.
‘We always win, don’t we?’
‘Yes, I know we do. I know. But there’s always the feeling we must come unstuck one day. You think we ever will?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Niggler said. ‘I don’t think so.’
With bland and dexterous hands Niggler broke an egg into a basin and then proceeded to bind the stuffing with it. All the time Mr Featherstone turned on him a low, keen eye of suspicion but there was never a flicker of any kind in answer.
‘You see,’ the Pearce explained as she trimmed the rind off two pieces of streaky bacon, ‘Niggler has this terrific flair about horses. Almost psychic. He’s got a sort of genius for picking the right ones.’
Presently Niggler had finished stuffing the birds and soon they were in the oven, each with its neat brassiere of bacon tied across the breast.
‘Well now, let’s have a butcher’s,’ Niggler said. An astonishing number of slips of paper fell from his wallet as he opened it. He selected one and for some time looked at it with studied penetration, as if seeking to interpret a text of some sort, at the same time scratching behind one ear.
‘Oh! what did you do for us this week?’ the Pearce said. ‘I’m dying to know. That’s what makes it so exciting – the not knowing part.’
&n
bsp; ‘Golden Rod,’ Niggler said. ‘Seven-to-two. That never come up. Bristol Fairy – you had ten bob each way on that at eight-to-one. Fell down. Crazy Night – forty-to-one, I thought we had one there, but – Now let’s see. That’s right. Son of Piper – that come up at a hundred-to-nine. And Fisherman’s Song – that came up at four-to-one.’
‘Genius!’ Monty said. ‘Genius!’
‘You damn well deserve half a chicken for yourself,’ the Pearce said. ‘What does that make us?’
Emerging presently from deep calculations Niggler said he reckoned it made them twenty-five bob apiece.
‘And what,’ said Mr Featherstone, ‘did you lay out?’
‘I think it was four pounds,’ Monty said.
The outlay, Mr Featherstone remarked rather caustically, hardly seemed to justify the return, did it?
‘Oh! on the contrary.’ Monty suddenly seemed less rhubarb-like. She appeared to be fluffed up, almost affronted. ‘I think it’s amply, amply justified. The thrill alone. The excitement. We adore our little flutter.’
‘In racing you’ve surely got to be philosophical,’ the Pearce said. ‘I should have thought that you, as a student of philosophy, would have known that.’
‘Unfortunately I don’t know very much about racing.’
‘No?’ the Pearce said, dealing Mr Featherstone a final, deeply crushing blow, ‘and perhaps, by the same token, you don’t know much about philosophy.’
Mr Featherstone was depressedly silent and Niggler, emerging not merely victorious but positively cosseted by the Pearce’s words, said with a sudden sigh that he thought he could do with a glass of water.
‘Oh! not water!’ The two ladies almost exploded the words together. ‘We have beer. We got a new crate in specially. Perhaps Mr Featherstone would like some too?’
Mr Featherstone rejected the idea of beer with polite thanks and said that he much preferred milk if there was any on hand.
‘Mind if I smoke?’ Niggler said and produced fag papers and shag, at the same time asking the Pearce if he could roll her one too. The Pearce thanked him but said she preferred her pipe, which she took out of her trousers pocket and tapped loudly on the heel of her shoe.
