*
The fame of my System of Records, if not their function exactly, had gone before them, and Merle wished to make their acquaintance almost as soon as she had made mine. For someone of her classificatory acumen and experience, it was quite self-evident how the Records worked, but I could see from the word ‘go’ that she wanted to make more of them than I had. From the pocket of her cardigan she produced a rubber thimble for her forefinger and fluttered through my index cards with practised ease, making girlish exclamations of delight. I remember she also leafed through the files of clippings, removing some that caught her eye and piling them face down on the arm of her chair. Then she turned one over in the afternoon sunlight slanting from the balcony windows, and laid it flat on the palm of her hand as gently as if it had been a feather or a pressed flower. It was an advertisement for Stirling’s Hardy Perennails. What might that lackadaisical florilegium contain? Voilets, dandeloins, hiacynths, anenomes. She laid the clipping face up on the table, turned over another, laid them side by side, shuffled them together, turned over a third, piled all three in one order and then another, as if she was trying to discover the rules of an unknown game; later, I came to associate that flick of her wrist with solitaire, which she sometimes played when the Café was full and noisy, turning the cards over expectantly, rediscovering order in the soothing congruences of chance.
The green fingers and thumbs of Mevrouw Bonsma interleaved a catalogue of floral riches: daffodils, heart’s-ease and phlox, meadowsweet and lady’s smocks.
When she was finished, Merle laid two clippings side by side. One was marked with a red cross, which meant that it had already been processed. I might have looked up the distinguishing corrigendum in my index in a matter of minutes. But evidently she had no interest in that, for she pointed to the photographs, which happened to show two women, and said, ‘Look, they could be sisters!’ I examined their faces closely. They looked nothing alike. With a laugh, she pointed out the family resemblance tucked away in the captions: Frau Schneider and Mrs Sartorius.
Merle was a great keeper of lists, as I am. But more than that, she was a lover of names. She had dozens of reference books on the origins of Christian names for boys and girls, surnames, nicknames, eponyms. Merle: from the Latin merulus via the Old French, meaning blackbird, of all things; and Graaff: from the German Graf, earl. She had lists of so-called ‘aptronyms’ that she had compiled herself, and curious theories about nominative determinism. Her memory was a trove of oddities, involving characters real and imaginary. Many people know that Three Men in a Boat was written by Jerome K. Jerome. But she knew what the K. stood for. And many know Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the warring qualities each embodied. But she knew that one was Henry to his friends, and the other Edward. She knew that Patrice Lumumba’s middle name was Emergy. That Ali Baba had a brother Cassim (not nearly as famous, but treacherous as a snake). And she once told me, without batting an eyelid, that Judy Garland had been born Frances Gumm, which surprised me no end.
After I’d introduced her to the System of Records, she started bringing in her reference books and lists to show me. There issued from the black bag in rapid succession (I was keeping track in my notebook) anatomical charts of the alimentary canal, the musculature, the endocrine (but thankfully not the reproductive) system; atlases; posters showing the flags of the world and butchers’ cuts for beef and mutton; a compendium of the internationally accepted rules for sports and games; a board for snakes and ladders, and another for Ludo (‘I play Ludo!’ Mevrouw Bonsma tautologized); lists of weights and measures; handy reckoners; books on the international standard road signs, origami, first aid, national cuisines, bibliography (the last by a person called Bibliotheker); the book of postal codes (the 1972 edition, in which I myself had taken a hand); and the Reader’s Digest Book of the Car. In this way, I supposed, she was expressing her gratitude for my having introduced her to the Records, and I was grateful in turn; I found many of her books interesting and turned up some first-rate corrigenda in them.
But Spilkin cast another light on things. He said she was trying to get to know me. ‘That is what people do,’ he said, ‘they share their interests. Isn’t that just what you and I did when we met?’
‘But this isn’t the same at all.’
Fact is, the more Merle and I ‘shared our interests’, the more I realized how different they were. My Records had a serious practical purpose: nothing as meanly instrumental as Spilkin had once implied, but a sincere wish to document, so allowing for comparison and improvement. Above all, they were exempla. Lexical gymnastics, although they had a recreational dimension, were aimed at maintaining the highest levels of skill and fitness and therefore at improving the quality of the Records. Even in my more frivolous pursuits, such as crosswording, I sought completion, while at the same time enriching my vocabulary and deepening my philological understanding. I never lost sight of my main purpose, which was to hold up examples of order and disorder, and thus contribute to the great task of maintaining order where it already existed and restoring it where it had been disrupted.
Merle’s lists were no more than pretexts for games. She was always inventing, always trying to create something new, seeking entertainment. But fantasizing, simply for the sake of it, had never struck me as a constructive way to pass the time. When I said so, she had the temerity to call me ‘dry’.
‘It’s not dryness. It’s rigour.’
‘Of the mortis variety.’
‘That’s rigor,’ I said, to put her in her place. ‘We’re not in the Land of the Free and Easy. You won’t catch me in Noah Webster’s leaky ark. Onions is my man, for fullness, and the Brothers Fowler for concision. I mean Henry and Frank.’
‘There, it’s the worst case of dryness I’ve ever encountered. But just you leave it to me. We’ll get the sap flowing in no time.’
Fun and games. One quietish evening – card games in progress at a few tables, conversation at others, Spilkin perched on a stool at the piano to watch the strings rippling like water over a weir – Merle piped up: ‘Want to play Wellington in plimsolls?’
‘Is that like playing Hamlet in tights?’
‘It’s a game. You have to think of eponyms and their progenitors and put them together. Like Wellington and Plimsoll. That was the first one I came up with.’
‘Tell me the rules.’
‘There aren’t any. They’re just amusing combinations – I could have made Plimsoll in wellingtons too, but that’s not so funny. Mind you, they shouldn’t have to be funny.’
I really was at a loss. When she scooped up my Concise, without so much as a by-your-leave, I didn’t even think to protest. She tossed aside my bookmarks and began to leaf.
Then she said: ‘Wellington in bluchers. That’s nice, they were both brass hats. Old Blücher’s lost his umlaut, I see. Pity. They’re like a couple of eyes for laces. Blücher in wellies, on the other hand, or rather foot, is an historical impossibility. But we don’t want to get bogged down in footwear.’
As I’ve said, games hold the barest interest for me at the best of times. But games without rules? Then again, there might be some etymological capital to be gained. I called for another example.
She blew on her tea, stirring up a little tempest, said pensively, ‘Mae West in a macintosh,’ and then laughed so uproariously that Spilkin came over to see what he was missing. Mevrouw Bonsma let him have a ditty for his trip across the room. He had to stop at a couple of tables along the way to exchange a friendly word or two – as if he were the manager rather than Mrs Mavrokordatos – and that gave Merle a chance to sip and ponder.
I racked my brain for eponyms. But my moisture content was lower then than it is now, although I am a good few years older and brittler in the bone, as you would expect. All that would come into my mind was Boycott! Boycott! Boycott! The newspapers were full of it.
Spilkin took to it like a bufflehead to water. ‘No bloomers in the jacuzzi. By order.’ It came out of him just like that.
‘Leotards are fine,’ Merle countered.
Watching the pair of them giggling like teenagers, I couldn’t help thinking that the joke was on me. I tried to laugh along in self-defence, but my face was stuck. It had gone all stiff around the mouth, as if my risorii had seized up, and I tried massaging them from the inside with my tongue.
‘What a long face,’ Merle said. She had taken off her spectacles and her eyes were streaming, making furrows down her powdered cheeks. I have always found the notion of laughing until one cries repugnant. One wants to preserve the boundaries between emotions, I think, or they lose their value.
‘Sandwich …’ Spilkin began.
‘This has gone far enough.’
‘… with sideburns!’
‘Not allowed.’
‘Stop being so silly.’
‘A bit of silliness never harmed anyone – except a stuffy old cardigan like you.’
Monsoons of laughter. Enough. I marched out and didn’t slacken my pace until I had shut my own front door behind me. To think that she would speak to me like that. Stuffy? Sinuses were clear. Lungs as capacious as ever. I’ve never smoked – a dirty habit for an untidy mind – and always walked. I went out onto the balcony to breathe some night air. The lights of the city stretched away to the south. No diamonds and velvet here, but wampum and brushed nylon. Strings of cheap yellow beads showed where the motorways ran, while those blocks of tawdry marcasite, marred by empty sockets, were the South Western Townships (‘Soweto’), or so Gideon, the Lenmar’s nightwatchman, assured me. The black holes belonged to the mines. Some people thought the most cosmopolitan touch on our skyline was the Hillbrow Tower: the flats that offered a view of it were actually more expensive. When I was flat-hunting, the caretaker at Milrita Heights had presented it as a feature, flinging back the curtains in the lounge with a theatrical gesture to show the smooth grey shaft plunging past the window. How was she to know I found it vulgar? Like an enormous parking meter. I’d settled for a place on the south side of Lenmar Mansions, with a view of the southern suburbs.
I went back inside and sat down at the dining-room table, where my notebooks were piled. The tips of my fingers felt dry. I had to keep licking them to turn the pages. Was I as dry as all that? A bent old stick, a twig, a broken reed. Perhaps Merle was right: I had no sense of fun. What were all these facts for? I had lists of every description: street names, buildings, shops, taxis, T-shirt slogans, books, sandwiches, orchestras, species of violence. I even had lists of lists. Here was my list of portmanteaus for residential blocks: Lenmar, Milrita, Norbeth, Ethelinda. It was clear enough what it captured. But what had I hoped it would reveal? Merle might turn the whole thing into a game. Test your knowledge of the city: match the constituent part in Column A (Len) with its mate in Column B (Mar). I would never have thought of that. Was setting an example enough? Or did one also have to enjoy oneself? Perhaps it was time I cultivated the sense of fun I seemed to be lacking.
When I arrived at the Café the next day, I had in my briefcase a notebook containing a peace offering. It was one of my lists. ‘Mr’ prefix, commercial enterprises. I showed it to Merle and Spilkin at once.
Spilkin’s eyes glittered. ‘Mr Bathroom, Mr Cupboard, Mr Juice … Mr Propshaft … Mr Spare Parts! Who are these people, Tearle? Friends of yours? Or family?’
‘Businesses. Culled from the telephone directories when I was employed by Posts and Telecommunications. I thought you might find the phenomenon interesting.’
‘I do.’
‘As I recall, the mania was started by a Mr X-haust, as they chose to spell it, back in the seventies. There was a logo too: a little man in overalls with a stethoscope around his neck for auscultating the Wankel engine.’ The eponym, skilfully inserted into the flow of the conversation, went unremarked. ‘Dr Exhaust, then, strictly speaking.’
‘Perhaps he was a surgeon.’
‘Mr X-haust,’ said Merle. ‘It’s quaintly polite. If he got into the newspapers these days, they’d call him plain old X-haust.’
‘Well, it struck me as odd at the time. As if the title alone rendered the enterprise reliable. Not Bertie X-haust, or X-haust and Co, but Mr X-haust. An exhaust man of the old school, someone you could trust to tinker with your manifold.’
‘It’s better than Uncle,’ said Spilkin.
‘You’ve got an uncle in the furniture business.’
‘Or “Oom”, which one also comes across.’
‘The extraordinary thing is how it caught on. The next year there were half a dozen copycats in the directory: Mr Frosty – an ice-cream maker – Mr Ladder, Mr Plastic, Mr Sweets. And more and more every year – a full column within five editions. Then a couple of Doctors, a brace of Sirs – Sir Juice and Sir Rubble – and even a Missus or two. I haven’t updated my list for a while, but it shouldn’t surprise me if they ran to a page by now.’
Eveready brought us the 1987 directory from behind the counter.
‘More than a page,’ Merle said. ‘They should form an organization.’
‘A union.’
‘A support group. Mr Furniture would be chairman.’
‘Chairperson,’ Spilkin corrected her. ‘And I propose Mr Cash and Carry for Treasurer.’
‘What about this Mr Spare Parts …’
‘He could do the catering.’
‘A resurrection man,’ I should have said, ‘or a muti murderer.’ One could joke about such things in those days, people saw the funny side of it, and understood that one meant no harm. But I just sat there with a mouth full of false teeth. Frosty ~ fugleman ~ fugle ~ fumigate. The wrong associations. Anyway, I could hardly have got a word in edgeways. They went at it hammer and tongs, just as I’d hoped they might, for a good twenty minutes. Unashamedly light-hearted fun. When Mevrouw Bonsma joined us, Spilkin dubbed her Mrs Tuning Fork and she was tickled. Then Merle said I was in the Book too, and pointed to Mr Crusty. A jest, but wounding nevertheless, given the unavoidable connotations of ‘dryness’. Crusty: irritable, curt, says the Concise. Also crust-like, hard – a veiled reference, perhaps, to my excrescences. It was then, in an attempt to crack off my crustiness with levity, that I suggested we boil the last half-hour’s shenanigans down into something for the Reader’s Digest, under the rubric of ‘Towards More Picturesque Speech’ or ‘Life’s Like That’. They pooh-poohed the idea (to be picturesque for a moment).
But when Merle went to the Ladies’ room, Spilkin leant over – Mrs Mavrokordatos had ouzoed him again, to judge by his liquorish, little-boy breath – and whispered in my ear, ‘You were made for each other: Mr and Mrs Dictionary.’
*
From that day forward, I vowed to adopt a more relaxed approach towards social intercourse and to take the whole idea of fun more seriously. And I sustained that effort, through thick and thin, in one way or another, until the curtain – and everything else – fell on the Goodbye Bash.
I initiated several games along the lines of ‘Wellington in plimsolls’. I tracked down cryptic clues for Spilkin in the papers and made up some of my own, most memorably the classics ‘Sautéd poet’ (8) and ‘female cannibal’ (3-5). Anecdotes of the more tasteful kind, which were occasionally to be found on the wireless, I transcribed into my notebook and brought out at opportune moments. I tried to be lighter, moister and less crusty, like a good soufflé. Once or twice, I ventured to clap along with Mevrouw Bonsma’s cheerier medleys.
In those golden days of the Café Europa, which were then beginning, I might have gone too far. My imagination was awakening from a long slumber, like some Rip van Winkel, and was bound to overreach as it stretched its limbs in a new world. (The comparison is unsuited in some ways, as my sleeping habits have always been perfectly normal, and I’ve never been married, much less henpecked, but it can stand.) Looking back, I would say that the handclapping was certainly a mistake. I also delivered a few witticisms that might have been better suppressed, although it was never my intention to wound, as some would claim afterwards.
But my most immoderate indiscretion was a practical joke, a form of wit I had always considered the lowest, fathoms below sarcasm (which strikes me as perfectly acceptable in a red-blooded fray).
All four of us were at the table one afternoon when Spilkin started the crossword. He was milling around, struggling to find the first indispensable ‘spilkin’, as even the most proficient puzzlers sometimes do, and Merle said, ‘Need a hand there?’
‘It’s a tricky one. I’ll get it going in a minute.’
‘It can’t be that hard.’ Merle was not a crossword puzzler herself – she said the people who compiled them had all the fun – and she was just pulling his leg. But her teasing prodded some sense of fun in me, or perhaps it was a cunning streak that I mistook for that etiolated sense.
I said, ‘He exaggerates how difficult it is, to make you admire him. The Star’s crossword is laughably simple. The cryptic clues would pass for straight clues in any normally endowed society. Intellectually speaking.’
‘Bosh,’ said Spilkin, ‘it takes you hours.’
‘Because I stretch it out to prolong the pleasure. I could do it in ten minutes flat if I wanted to – but what’s the point of rushing?’
‘I’d like to see you get it out faster than me.’
‘Sounds like a challenge, Aubrey.’
‘Name your weapons.’
He waggled the Waterman. Perfect. Eveready brought my copy of the newspaper from behind the counter. I extracted the Tonight! section, turned to the puzzle and folded the straight clues under. Sharpened my pencil and poised it. Nodded to Merle to start the clock.
‘One across,’ I said. ‘Poetry serves badly.’ And paused for a finely judged second. ‘Verses.’ I spoke it out loud and wrote it in. Spilkin followed suit. ‘Two across: Safely wired near the dangerous part.’ One thousand and one, one thousand and two. ‘Earthed.’ Wrote that in. ‘One down: Muddled reports etc looking back. Retrospect.’
The Restless Supermarket Page 10
