by Adam Thorpe
Phlegmy clearing of throat. I use the term, sir, in its censuring sense. Ah, of course, you have not examined the offending evidence.
Sir?
The pictures, sir.
The pictures?
The pictures, sir.
What pictures, sir?
The, ah, the pictures.
Christ, this conversation’s not exactly the M4, guv. Merry Old Oldsmobile, son. Average speed eighteen to twenty-four m.p.h. The Post Office must be laughing all the way to the banco. I hope they improve things with the profit, I hope they get rid of the guys frying their sausages on the cables or whatever. Hey, Boulter’s hand is trembling. It’s good to see him suffer a little. He was hoping he wouldn’t have to cover this ground. It’s rocky. No, it’s swampy. Bosey’s doing a great job in the circumstances, getting cramp and stuff. Mike’s got a 500w kicker on Big Cunt which is getting a nice sheen off the phone’s nickel-plated metalwork. Wish I could nickel it, nudge nudge. It’d go a bomb down in Houston. The repro
pictures I assumed by now, clearly erroneously, the content of which would have been imagined by you sufficiently clearly to have needed no illuminating additional discourse therewith. Sir.
You – you speak of certain articles of a pictorial nature belonging to my late son, I take it?
By him, sir. Engendered, as one may put it, by him. Art of a sort, sir. Your son was an artist in his time here, of the stripling Bohemian type. Did you – did you – did you by any chance just now use the term late, sir?
I did. Any objection?
Only that I am of the opinion that it is a word causing a deal of confusion. I tell my pupils to keep off late unless in the sense of tardy or – or – and ah, what is more, your son held no position. Quondam is a very useful—
Good God, sir! We’re having a lesson in grammaticals now, are we? Quondam? Quondam? Will quondam do? Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my quondam son! Piffle! All piffle!
Boulter clicks. The penny’s dropped. A whole new area of his brain starts whirring. It makes him dribble on to his whiskers. He sees a break in the crackles and makes for it.
Good gracious. How very – how very unfortunate.
There’s unfortunate again! Confound it, sir, your attitude is most disagreeable. I can only think you are quite inebriated.
Inebriated, sir?
Inebriated, sir. That, or of a most cruel disposition, that takes its pleasure in twisting the knife. Twisting the knife, sir.
Dead right, me old chap, on both counts. Inebriated and a right bastard. Well done. Boulter’s tongue appears like a nervous water-rat’s snout in the foam-flecked tangle of his beard. Thank you.
When, ah, exactly how and when did your son, ah, ah, pass, ah – away, Mr Trevelyan?
He’s wiping his brow clear of some really impressive sweat-drops. He’s shaking. He’s thinking that perhaps it’ll be said that he went rather too far. Delicate boy. Shame, remorse. A hammer to a pin. There might be a scandal. Good God, there might be a fall in numbers. The Bursar will wave his Mahdi scimitar around again and one’ll have to take cover. My back’s going straight. I’m half out of the chair. This is enjoyable.
Am I to understand, sir, that you are unaware of the exact circumstances of his – my dear son’s – passing away into a better life?
Oh. Oh no. I am. Indeed I am quite wholly ignorant of the fact. Quite, quite ignorant, sir.
Mr Boulter wants to swoon. He’s taking a swig of 1908 Old Ruby straight from the neck. Mr Trevelyan gets an earful of Big Cunt’s oesophagus flushing. Bosey’s eyebrows go up. He’s not had such a great time since he recorded the Niagara Falls for Brian Eno. Or someone.
I – I find – I find that most confoundedly odd, sir. Nay, I find it shocking.
Good gracious, how should I have known? I have received no call from you since my own this morning! This morning! Only this morning!
Careful, Boulter, you’re into your whine mode. You’re also tipping your transmitter and it ain’t gonna work properly if you do that. That’s better. Keep a hold on yourself. Durex virus neuters or whatever it is.
own this morning, sir?
My own this morning!
Dash it, we received no call from you this morning—
Ha, beg to differ. I talked to your – to Mrs Trevelyan. Deuce, to the boy’s mother, sir.
You talked to my wife?
No, I talked – yes, yes, the same. I assume the same.
Ah.
You know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking that Beatrice was pissed again and too hors de combat to remember receiving the call or maybe she blanked out from the shock.
Are you – are you absolutely certain you talked to my wife, sir? To Mrs Beatrice Flora Barkiss Trevelyan, sir?
OK, I was wrong. He’s Mr Smartie-Pants 1913. Sorry.
As certain as one can ever be, sir, at the other end of a telephone apparatus and with an ignorance of the full appellative of she who certainly and without a shadow of a doubt claimed to be your wife, sir. The wind, the wind.
Coincidentally Boulter lifts his bottom and releases a pocket of it. Bosey gags practically but sticks to his post.
Then, sir, I think you are mistaken. She who is most certainly my dear wife has made no mention whatsoever of having received a call from you, Headmaster. I doubt in the circumstances she would have forgotten it.
Ah. Then either I was mistaken or – or fooled by an imposter!
There are no imposters in this household, sir. It was undoubtedly my daughter you spoke to and who took the message from you. She was too upset to tell us immediately. She has just done so. She has done so in a befitting manner, sir. In stark contrast to the manner in which you have conducted yourself in this wholly tragic business, Headmaster.
Tragic indeed, sir, if he has as you say passed to a considerably greater weigher of souls than I.
Hey, don’t get too modest, Boulter babe. It doesn’t suit you, it really doesn’t.
I think we can assume that he has gone thitherward.
Of course, of course. Good gracious oh dear me. A most unfortunate business.
Unfortunate again?
Unfortunate, yes.
Oh no, oh no. This conversation is on a LOOP. Hey, let me out, they’re getting nowhere quickly, it’s like listening to a spaghetti junction or something. But you get the idea. Boulter thinks Trevelyan Minimus has topped himself and the bastard feels bad about it in various ways while Trevelyan Extra Maximus thinks Willo succumbed to some lung thing overnight and Boulter’s abreacting or just lush. I think a résumé is necessary because traffic is very boring to listen to, especially when it’s looped. Now let’s out. I’m feeling my claustrophobia coming on. I need a drink. Bosey mate, leave the guy his port, it’ll give you a headache, it’s been there nearly a century. Like the conversation. Like the phone. Like the Titanic. Like the 1 in 5 deck of the Titanic and the guys all singing on the prow.
Last one to slide off please kill the lights.
HOPE THE PERIOD puddings are something to write home about. Leave me a couple of éclairs and a chunk of sago because down our way the sago’s cold. Dorothy had made this great sago pudding and for once she’d chopped the beef suet finely enough and not completely smothered it in powdered loaf-sugar and even the custard was not too lumpy. But no one apart from Uncle Kenneth’s touched it. Lily’s come back down saying there’s still some to-do on the telephone and memsahib’s having one of her squalls and George’s tic is back after a long time in hibernation. The sago has to be eaten straight off or it goes kind of quick-dry cementish but only Uncle Kenneth’s touching it. Dorothy is more than a mite upset. She was already a mite upset because of the potatoes complaint George was really careful to pass on to Lily when Lily came up to clear the decks of the mutton course trying not to notice Miss Trevelyan and Mr Trevelyan grappling in the hall because if they murder each other it’ll be in the papers and it never does to open yer mouf more’n you can get a farving in let the ticking clock guide the b
oiling crock see no evil hear no evil speak no evil busybodies never have anything to do stewed cheese and onions good for sound sleep and bunions.
Hey, don’t snigger, we all have our little tags, our chapbooks, our Good Things Said For Every Home And Household. I mean, I do. Like: How hide from oneself the fact that it all winds up on a rectangle of white fabric hung on a wall? (See your film as a surface to cover.) (Thank you, M. Bresson). Or: Not artful, but agile (thank you again, Robert). Or: Shooting. Agony of making sure not to let slip any part of what I merely glimpse, of what I perhaps do not yet see and shall only later be able to see. (Same guy. I’m flicking through my red leather notebook and it’s in alphabetical order. It’s Cocteau next. There are two hundred and twenty pages. It’s all really serious, OK? No Hollywood gags, no immortal bitching, no Howard Hughes on the very simple engineering problem of Jane Russell’s brassière or Groucho Marx on being around so long he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin or Mae West on a hard man being good to find and that kind of wisecrack bumper-sticker stuff Dr Lazenby learns carefully by heart to make young girls’ breasts wiggle up and down behind their wet T-shirts which reminds him of Joe Pasternak on Esther Williams [Wet, she was a star, dumbos. Where have y’all bin this century?]. I never lend my chapbook, old chap. It’s been buckled by the sun or maybe the rain. Zelda once said that it shows a basic insecurity in me. I replied Zelda, No psychology – of the kind which discovers only what it can explain. She said there you go, you can only reply in italics. Try to believe in yourself a bit more, find the inner voice, the core thing, the silence. I replied Zelda honey, Debussy himself used to play with the piano’s lid down. I have eleven more pages of Bresson. No wonder people think I’m a genius.)
Mr Trevelyan’s just come off the phone. You could take a mould for a new Western Electric Company earpiece off of his ear. He’s white. Agatha is also white. Whiter than usual, I mean, which is very white indeed because getting a tan is something only the agricultural labourer does at this time and anyway it’s November. They’re back in the dining-room staring at this glass bowl full of sago and custard. No one’s said anything for a few minutes. Agatha’s finding the sago and custard incredibly de-inspiring. It seems to be weighing on her brain as it usually weighs on her stomach. As a matter of fact, this is a projection on her part. Life in England in 1913 is fairly sagoey. I suppose life in England has been and always will be fairly sagoey. Sagoey the way Dorothy makes sago, anyway. So it’s not the sago that’s lumping around Agatha’s brain so much as the brain lumping around the sago. Although I reckon that if you had to keep going off a diet of stuff like jugged hare and broiled rumpsteaks and cold beef with Yorkshire Relish and suet pudding when the sago’s off and hashed mutton from yesterday’s boiled leg of mutton in a quart of brown gravy and beef-and-potato pie as a nice change from fish cakes followed up by a touch of tapioca or maybe macaroni with black treacle on it – hey, you wouldn’t exactly be feeling light on your toes, would you?
Mr Trevelyan’s had to sit down. Agatha has sat down because, hey, she just did – it’s uncomfortable being the only one vertical except the servants who are always either vertical or stooped or on their knees. Mrs Trevelyan’s about to blow her nose in a small square of embroidered chiffon which is the 1913 equivalent of those pink paper tissues that disappear like candy floss the minute they touch any nasal mucus. Uncle Kenneth is eating some sago. His stomach always comes first, as he jokes, because actually physically speaking it does. He’s like General Sam Houston who had to wear a girdle to stop it spilling over his dick. And I live somewhere named after this gross slaughterer of the indigenous peoples. Otherwise Uncle Kenneth bears no resemblance to General Houston. For a start off, he’d be a catastrophic general. I know, I know, in ten months’ time that’d be just fine but you know what I mean. He never does the appropriate thing. That’s why I like him. The point is, we should’ve stuck with the phone conversation because it became transparently obvious towards the end, just after we quit and hailed a Basingstoke-bound dung-cart that there had been some serious miscommunication. That’s the story of my life, actually. I never stick it out quite long enough. I mean, I nearly got almost blown up once but I left the hotel about a day too soon. I was on vacation in Sri Lanka and it would’ve made a great dining-out story and, OK, no one was killed, but I could’ve got shaken and stirred and maybe taken a few cuts here and there and it would’ve improved my self-image. But saying you missed it by a day doesn’t exactly get the forks clattering on the plates. It’s like National Service. I just missed National Service by the time Awxford had bin and gawn and my carefully-rehearsed mental problems had cleared up but I wish now I hadn’t. Zelda was amazed that I’d never been a soldier with my musket fife and drum. She reckoned I must have been at least a Desert Rat or stumbled up a few French beaches under withering fire or whatever. Yeah yeah, guv, you’ve guessed it. Dr Turdsville was in Vietnam. He was a fifteen-year-old conscript or something and went through Hell and unfortunately out again the other side. He’s seen things, said Zelda. Ricky, he’s really seen things you and I will never understand. Uh-huh? Uh-huh. Well, he probably killed people, Zelda. Mi Lai and stuff. You never know. Women and children, babies, pet kittens. They were all stoned. I’ve seen the film. Yeah, she said, looking like a kid who’s just seen Arnold Schwarzenegger for the first time and has got him confused with Arthur Schopenhauer. Yeah, we’ll just never understand what the guy’s had to suffer, Rick. Holy shit, it’s that mothering thing, you know? She thinks she’s Jane Fonda or somebody. I tried to get this damaged look in my eyes and pulled down my mouth and started murmuring meaningfully about the Blitz except that I have no personal memory of the Blitz, it stopped about a day before I was old enough and anyway I was knee-high in cow-dung near Llansantffraed Cwmdeuddwr never getting beyond the new address in my letters home while John Boorman was running around in shorts and sepia tones in what was left of Poplar or wherever and something about the poor old Jacksons next door and their dog – I can’t go into it now – got Zelda into hysterics. Every time I opened my mouth I felt like an Osbert Lancaster cartoon. That was the last time we lay with each other. Now the damaged look’s real. Maybe it’s the hashish. Mrs Trevelyan’s blown her nose. All Clear. Shaaaddaaap.
think I wish to ruin your digestion, Kenneth.
I do not, I certainly do not. I’ve always been something of a sago chap. It goes down very easy—
Preposterous. The whole thing is spiteful and preposterous. That is all, at present, I can manage. One would have thought shame would have impelled a certain loss of appetite, if nothing else.
Hunger makes the best sauce, my dear.
Of two evils the lesser has been chosen, Beatrice. It goes without saying that I for one feel considerable relief.
Then why say it, Arthur?
Because it might be forgot, otherwise, in the rush towards the new situation.
I am rushing absolutely nowhere. I am too debilitated, my nerves are shattered, I have made a great fool of myself in front of the servants—
Mother, William lives! Does that not outweigh all other considerations?
I think you did it quite deliberately.
Did what, Mother?
Chhum chhum, my dhear sish—
To try to conceal faults is but to add to them, brother-in-law. A pity that does not extend to speaking with your mouth full of pudding.
I did not do it deliberately, Mother.
Agatha is crossing her fingers under the table, just in case you were worried there. Uncle Kenneth has swallowed his last dollop and is wiping his mouth on his napkin for once. George and Milly are clearing up the gravy and the wreck of its boat in dead silence, like they’re doing it underwater. At least, Milly is, down on her knees, bottom in the air. George just watches, bent over a bit, with his gargoyle look shifted around by the fire, looking like he’s in the opening minute of The Maid’s Seduction by Charles Pathé or whoever. He’ll be placing his hand-tinted hand on her apron ties in a second,
then’ll bunch her skirt and petticoats right up and on to her back and tickle the hand-tinted globes poking out of her open knickers like he’s testing a very large apricot and maybe she’ll turn her head round and smile at the camera and FIN will flicker up and the screen go white and this cute little classic’ll end up being flapped at hopelessly by a projectionist who was careless with his roll-up and charcoaling a secret cinema around 1921. I lie, I lie – George is way too ugly for a cellulose nitrate skin-flick. He’s Charlie Laughton. He’s way-over-budget unfinished epic. We’re lucky to have him.
Mr Trevelyan’s hands are flat on the table, as if he’s about to get up. But he isn’t. If all these people were aeroplanes their altimeters’d be going like windscreen wipers. What I mean is, they’re kind of up and down simultaneously and desperate to land someplace if only the alpine crags’d stop looming. Wheeeeeeeaaaaahhh.
Please, don’t be cross, Mother.
Now if I was Mother my heart’d go from stone to maple syrup as quickly as it takes Dorothy to turn blancmange powder into blancmange, which is pretty quick. But I am not Mother I am great-nephew, and never heard Agatha say please don’t be cross great-nephew, because I missed her by about twenty years, which is a big miss but not a lot when you take into consideration the six million of them we’ve been loping around for. Mother is Mother. And it doesn’t matter what the hell you hit her heart with it just stays stony. Sure, it fizzes and sparks and gives off belching clouds of green smoke like something I remember doing once upon a time in a chemistry class but when you’ve opened the windows and gagged and waved all that stuff out until the lab clears you’ve got the same basic stuff intact. It’s very depressing. So Mrs Trevelyan just fixes Imploring by Burne-Jones with to put it basically a look from the Extremely Nasty range and says:
Do try, my dear, to act the adult now and again.
Phew! What a scorcher!
Imploring by Burne-Jones turns into St Sebastian by I dunno Goya and needs its blisters repairing. OK, quit the gallery, Ricardo. Agatha’s face is hot, she only just manages to prevent an excess of salt water by widening her eyelids so it gets soaked up by her eyeballs or something and emits a short sigh. This is not going at all well. In fact, it’s going frightfully awfully badly as Custer did not say during his Last Stand. When I think of Custer I smell vomit, it’s complicated, my daughter couldn’t take the whoopings on the wide screen, I bought an ice cream afterwards, or maybe two, with chocolate flakes sticking out of them, I totally spoiled her and now she hates me. The decent forces are always getting routed by the forces of spite and bitterness led by General Ill-Will. Custer’s Cock-Up was an exception. And they don’t even know that William is up in the attic waiting for his grand entrance. It’ll be a grand exit at this rate, like the second cousin once removed who was very much removed. Papa is a better bet. She turns to Papa.
