‘Yes, well, it’s a bit swollen,’ said the doctor. ‘Probably only a sprain, though. Can you wiggle your toes?’
‘Doan know.’
‘Well, don’t just sit there. Find out.’
Gouts of sweat stood out on Enoch’s forehead as he made the experiment. Presently, with some reluctance, he said, ‘Ar.’
‘It’s a sprain then, for sure,’ said the doctor. ‘Still, better be safe than sorry. I’m taking this young lady into Glazebridge for X-rays, so you can come and be done too.’
‘Can’t move.’
‘Then you’d better make preparations for spending the night here. Fen, come and give me a hand, will you?’
With Enoch’s arms fastened vice-like round their necks on each side, they managed to get him, hopping on one foot, to the car, and to cram him somehow inside. ‘You coming with us, Fen?’ the doctor asked.
But Fen shook his head. ‘I’ve had quite enough excitement this morning already,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk back home and have a quiet afternoon, I think.’
‘Me bike!’ shouted Enoch from inside the car. ‘What about me bike?’
Fen sighed. ‘I’ll look after your bike for you,’ he said, and waved them on their way.
With its handlebars all twisted, Enoch’s bike proved intractable, and Fen, after being forced virtually to heft it for a short distance, decided that he was tired of philanthropy and carried the machine into the Rector’s garden, where he hid it behind a hedge, skulking there himself until de Brisay and the Rector had arrived in the Mini and gone inside. Then he made his escape. The psychedelic estate wagon, he noted in passing, was empty now. (It remained in position, slowly falling to bits, for months and months afterwards, while the police vainly tried to ascertain its ownership, and eventually had to be towed away to be pulped. The bald youth and the hunt saboteuse, Mr Dodd’s intimates later learned, had suddenly got tired of quarrelling -had, indeed, all at once shown every sign of nursing the warmest affection for each other - and ‘We’re going to copulate,’ the hunt saboteuse announced, rather as if referring to a visit to some festival such as Glyndebourne or Bayreuth, ‘and we’re going to do it behind a hedge, the way all decent animals do.’ With this much preliminary, they had gone off together to find a suitable gate; though whether their congress was successful or not was never known, since no one in Devon ever set eyes on them again. As to Mr Dodd, he had reeled unsteadily along the lanes leading to Glazebridge and home and a spare pair of glasses, being mercifully picked up near Hole Bridge by a customer who took him the rest of the way. Thereafter, his interest in hunt sabotage became increasingly theoretical, eventually petering out altogether despite the impassioned reproaches of his whilom fellow-crusaders.)
So Fen passed the marooned estate wagon and continued on his way, soon reaching the turning which led up to the Dickinsons’ cottage. In the hut in the garden of Thouless’s bungalow, dreadful dissonances suggested that he had been compelled to abandon his relief music in favour of yet another monster, and at Youings’s pig farm a man sent by Clarence Tully was attending to the requirements of Youings’s pigs.
‘Boo,’ he said, turning at Fen’s approach. ‘Boo, ah boo-boo.’
‘Boo?’ Fen answered amenably, and was at once subjected to a perfect storm of booing, an opera-singer’s nightmare. When this had subsided a little:
‘Bοο,’ Fen said, ‘Oh, ah, boo-boo.’
The idiot was plainly delighted at this incisive, thoughtful response. ‘Boo,’ he said, waving his hand in friendly dismissal, and reverted to feeding the pigs. ‘Boo.’
’Boo,’ Fen agreed, and passed on up the lane. Trudging up the rocky defile which did service as the Dickinsons’ drive, and which looked as if it marked, unaltered, the passage of some small but implacable glacier of the quaternary, Fen reflected that village idiots were something of a rarity these days, whereas in previous times the mating of two members of a particularly stupid family (Mum [on her death-bed, to her eldest daughter Gwladys]: And you, Glad my girl, you just see to it, after I’m gone, that yer Da’s kept comfy-like. Know what I mean? Gwladys [with enthusiasm]: Oh yes, Mum! Mum: That’s all right, then. These nasty things are best kept in the family, that’s what I always say. [Dies; after a seemly interval for weeping, Gwladys hies her blithely to incestuous sheets.]) - whereas in previous times the mating of two members of a particularly stupid family could virtually be relied on to engender an ament of one sort or another. Now the breed had largely died out, possibly because in 1908 incest was made illegal, possibly because of the efforts of such as the Rector, possibly because -
At this stage of his meditations, Fen woke to the awareness that there was a tortoise-shaped lacuna in his garden. Good. The pansies were mostly wilting or dead, Ellis was fussy about what else he ate, and it was time for him to be having another go at hibernation in any case. (Fen vaguely recalled glimpsing a tortoise somewhere quite recently, but where?) Meanwhile, Stripey was waiting with a haunted look - he had been overdoing the sex again - outside the front door for someone to come and let him in. Fen did this, and they rushed side by side to the scullery, Fen only remembering to duck his head in the nick of time. Here, with Stripey performing figure eights between and around his ankles, Fen opened Kattomeat, chopped it up in a dish and dumped it on the mat, subsequently, in addition, supplying fresh milk and water, with a sense of the vanity of human endeavour which arose from the fact that Stripey seemed partial to neither fluid: at all events, Fen had never witnessed his sampling them. Turning now to his own requirements, Fen took a terrine of foie gras from the refrigerator, along with a half-bottle of Roederer Kristal Brut; supplemented this nourishment with a glass, a plate, a spoon, a knife and some water biscuits; and was about to carry the whole lot into the living-room when his attention was caught by an unfamiliar white blur on the mantelpiece above the Ray-burn. Disburdening himself temporarily, he went to investigate, finding a message for him scribbled on a sheet torn from a Shopping-List pad. It was from his cleaner, and it ran:
I singed for this as it seamed alright,
Bragg
(Mrs Bragg for some reason always referred to herself in this synoptic fashion - and indeed to her whole family of whatever age of sex, even including the baby [‘Bragg cut another tooth during the night’]. She apparently feared that any further fissidity in the naming of the clan, other than what was required to differentiate it from the rest of the world, would result in estrangements among its various members, or even in total cataclysmic disintegration; as a consequence, no one in her household could ever be sure whom she was addressing at any given time.)
Her note was propped against a letter marked in one place ‘Special Delivery’, and in another, ‘Recorded Delivery’. The scrawled address on The Letter was in the handwriting of Henry, the St Christopher’s College porter at Oxford with whom Fen, unfortunately, as Dean, was in a constant state of muted enmity. Leaving for his sabbatical, Fen had given Henry instructions that nothing whatever was to be forwarded to him, at his Devon address, unless it seemed of the first importance -and Henry, conscious of the limits which the lowliness of his position vis-à-vis dons imposed on his disobedience, had so far forwarded nothing. This, however, he had dared to forward, so what could it be? Fen tore open Henry’s envelope to find another envelope inside it, addressed to him at the College in a cursive, clerkly hand. Also, it was registered; its flap was secured, in addition to the usual gum, with a large, impressive red seal. Below this, in print, ran the legend, ‘If undelivered, return at once to the Senior Official Receiver, Thomas More Building, Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, W.C.2.’ It read like an instruction from an obstetrician to a lady whose gestation has gone long beyond its proper term, and who has been given oxytocin to hurry matters up.
Anyway, it explained Henry: Henry had fancied that Fen’s absence had given his creditors the chance to file a suit in bankruptcy against him, and had been anxious that he should know about this, and be reduced to a fit of the tremors, at the ea
rliest possible moment - for, as la Rochefoucauld remarked, there is always something pleasing to us in the misfortunes of others, especially when the others are Professors and you are merely a porter. Fen snorted, thrust the envelope unopened into his jacket pocket, re-assembled his meal and carried it into the living-room, where - suppressing his usual qualms about obese poultry with induced hepatitis - he unsealed the terrine, opened the Roederer and settled down on the chesterfield to eat and drink. In order to keep in touch with civilization while he did this, he grabbed the topmost book from the nearest pile and began to read it. It was called Hackenfeller’s Ape, and was the work of Brophy, Brigid.
Stripey, meanwhile, unsated by Kattomeat, had slunk into the room, jumped up on to the coffee table, and was attacking the foie gras. Fen noticed this pilfering too late to put a stop to it. He fetched a second terrine from the scullery, ran the knife round that, took off the top, and had scarcely settled back into the chesterfield before he observed that with terrine one still not half consumed, Stripey had moved on to terrine two, and was making heavy inroads on that. Grateful that the creature was in both senses a pussyfoot, Fen drank some champagne and returned to his reading.
Hackenfeller. It sounded like a Groucho alias - Otis B. Hack-enfeller, Licensed Chiropractor. Not more than twenty pages, however, were needed to convince Fen that in this particular script, S. J. Perelman had had no hand.
Abruptly tiring of literature, Fen remembered the registered letter, took it from his pocket and wrenched it open, a large proportion of the splintered red wax going into the Roederer. Jobson and Ellis (who had commissioned the book on modern British novelists) were unhappily, he learned, going into voluntary liquidation, owing to being unable to meet their debts; all contracts with authors were consequently suspended until matters had been clarified; further information would be forthcoming in due course; pending this, the writer was Fen’s very obedient servant, Squiggle.
Fen pondered this; and the more he pondered it, the more he liked it. Some of the reading had been enjoyable, of course - The Doctor is Sick, I Want It Now, ‘the Balkan trilogy’, Elizabeth Bowen, The Ballad and the Source. But much more had not - and a great deal that was pending wasn’t going to be, either.
‘Wasn’t going to be’? What did he mean, ‘Wasn’t going to be’? Wouldn’t have been,’ because he wouldn’t now be doing any of it.
With a sigh in which repining played little part, Fen abandoned Brophy, Brigid, and reached for Gibbon’s Autobiography instead.
13. The Chesterton Effect
And then comes answer like an Absey book.
William Shakespeare: King John
1
‘So the man from Sweb wasn’t the murderer after all,’ said the Major. ‘Pity. I rather fancied him.’
‘You’d fancy an earthworm to win the National,’ said the Rector.
‘Extraordinary you should say that, because I once actually knew a horse called Earthworm. He was called Earthworm because he kept trying to burrow, I’ve no idea why. Heaven only knows what goes on in those ghastly great pop-eyed heads of theirs.’
The Rector drank soup. ‘Not wanting to be my valet,’ he said. ‘Preferring to go to prison. Can you imagine such a thing?’
‘Well, yes, my dear chap, since you come to mention it, I can.’
‘I seem to be losing my thaumaturgical touch, too,’ said the Rector, uncomforted. ‘Talked to him about Christianity all through the Tournedos Barbara, and at the end of it all, do you know what he said?’
‘One could make several guesses,’ said the Major reservedly.
‘Said he had a nice little nest-egg tucked away, and would I sell him my cook. I said my cook wasn’t to be bought and sold like some Nubian slave, but afterwards I caught the two of them muttering together in a corner, and he was saying something about people who play horrible practical jokes on innocent bystanders, and she’d taken one of his hands and was patting it. Patting it! I didn’t think much of that, I can tell you. Gave them both the sharp end of my tongue, in a way they won’t forget in a hurry.’
‘They haven’t,’ said Fen. ‘I was passing your house earlier this evening, and your cook was getting into a taxi, along with a lot of luggage.’
‘Appropinquet deprecatio,’ said the Rector, rolling his eyes to the ceiling and momentarily forgetting the popish effluvium which hung about the Latin language like butterflies round a buddleia. ‘Ah well, I suppose it’s scrambled eggs and chips from now on. They’re the only things I can do,’ he said to Fen. ‘However, when I do do them, I do them well. As my grandmother always used to say, “You can’t cook scrambled eggs too slow, and you can’t cook chips too quickly.” It’s true, too.’
The Major faintly groaned. On the one or two occasions when this sort of thing had happened before, he had been expected, he remembered, to enthuse over stirred-together yolks and whites of virtually uncooked egg, dotted with splinters of adamant butter and served on a substratum of charcoal sticks. He made a mental resolve that until the Rector got himself a new housekeeper, he, the Major, was going to find himself subject to painful aftermaths of his Fall whenever issued with an invitation to eat at γ wurry. To change the subject he now said:
‘De Brisay won’t get much of a sentence, though, will he, so long as you don’t testify against him?’
‘Well, I shan’t do that,’ said the Rector, spooning up more soup. ‘I most certainly shan’t do that. Wretched misguided fellow’s more than repaid his debt to society, as far as I’m concerned. Lovely soot, stink like a polecat, half deafened, and then that fellow in leggings comes along and conks him on the nut with his mill-board. Haw-haw,’ said the Rector, his Christian charity momentarily in abeyance. ‘No testifying from me. No bringing charges, I mean.’
‘But the police are going to bring charges,’ Fen pointed out.
‘Let ’em.’
‘Which means you’re bound to be sub-poena’d.’
‘Oh Lor’, does it?’
‘Of course it does. So what are you going to say?’
The Rector thought about this; then: ‘I shall tell Hizonner,’ he announced eventually, ‘that I deliberately lured the man into my house. And it’ll be quite true. I did.’
‘And that you then deliberately lured him into surreptitiously making off with your grandmother’s jewel-safe?’
‘H’m. Yes, I see what you mean. That’s going to be a bit more difficult.’
‘I never saw any good that came of telling truth. Dryden.’
‘That wet.’
‘Yes, fancy anyone thinking that Paradise Lost would make a good light opera,’ said the Major. ‘I’m surprised Milton let him in the house. Now, let’s see, where was I?’
‘It was I who was speaking,’ said the Rector, peeved. ‘Though evidently not to much effect… Fen, if you were in my position, what would you do?’
‘I’d tell them the whole thing from beginning to end, just as it happened. It really is quite funny, you know. The judge’ll be so sorry for poor de Brisay that he’ll get off very lightly, you’ll see.’ (And this, in the event, was what happened.)
The fine spell had broken at last: it was not only blowy and rainy, the gusts flinging the raindrops against the old window-panes of the Dickinsons’ cottage like handfuls of tiny pebbles; it was cold as well, and Fen’s two guests were grateful when he moved the kitchen table close to the Rayburn. A farewell party, this was to have been, but two of the invited had proved unable to come. Thouless was all agog, since for once he had been commissioned to compose the score for a film not involving more work for the make-up people, the special effects men and the art director than for anyone else. True, he told Fen, a very similar type of music seemed to be expected of him, but he was hoping to insinuate a late-Romantic chord or two here and there. Anyway, he was very sorry, but he was committed to go to Pinewood to see the film a second time, and so couldn’t, much as he would have liked to, share in the jollifications Fen had presumably planned.
‘Wh
at’s the film called?’ Fen had asked, mildly interested.
‘Warts.’
‘I see. And what’s it about?’
‘Almost entirely, it’s about several couples having a bang in bed in Paris. They keep switching around, but I’m not sure of the reason. Anyway, some of the things they get up to - ! You’d scarcely think they were anatomically possible. I mean, there are some angles the human skeletal and muscular structures are quite simply incapable of, so I suppose a lot of it must be trick photography. The great thing is, though, from my point of view, that it’s not about monsters, it’s about sex. There are bits I can use up, too, one long section in particular, for where the hero and heroine seem to be standing on their heads, mother-naked, with their toes intertwined. I don’t know,’ Thouless said doubtfully, ‘that I should very much want to try that myself.’
‘Anyway, the point is, you’ve already got the music for it.’
‘For that particular scene, yes, I have. Quite a big bit which they cut out of The Blob. I shall scarcely have to alter it at all.’
‘And what was it for originally?’
‘It was for beaked dekapods being slowly incinerated by a death-ray in a space-ship. Much the same sort of thing, really. Well, cheerio. Been nice knowing you. Have a good time.’
Padmore’s leave-taking had been considerably less ebullient. ‘I can’t think what I’ve done wrong,’ he kept saying to Fen, who had gone to Glazebridge station that morning to see him off. ‘I just can’t think what I’ve done wrong. They said I was doing such a good job down here, and -’
‘Yes, of course you did a good job, but the telegram explained that, didn’t it? The Crime Staff is fit to go to work again.’
‘Yes.’ Padmore stared for the umpteenth time at the message on the piece of paper which had been delivered to him with his breakfast: ‘Come back to London soonest prepare leave for Libya soonest terrorists blowing up all the oilwells there.’ ‘I don’t like bombs,’ said Padmore. ‘I don’t want to be bombed.’
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 30
